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Nurse call glossary

More than 85 technical, regulatory and operational terms from the Belgian nurse call and care home sector. A factual reference for directors, head nurses, architects and installers.

A

Care action logging: Timestamped recording of a care action on a nurse call, entered manually from a DECT handset or captured automatically through BLE presence detection in the room.
Wandering prevention: Set of devices and procedures designed to prevent a disoriented resident from leaving the secured areas of a care home unaccompanied.
Elopement prevention: Synonym for wandering prevention, covering systems that protect at-risk residents through wristband, gateway and graduated alerts.
Nurse call: Device through which a care home resident requests the intervention of care staff from their room, bathroom or a communal area.
Patient call: Historical synonym for nurse call, inherited from hospital vocabulary and still found in older specifications and tender documents.
Open architecture: System whose protocols, interfaces and data formats are standardised, documented and interoperable with equipment from several manufacturers.
Audit: Methodical evaluation of an installation (nurse call, network, security, GDPR) against objective criteria, with a report, costed scenarios and recommendations.
AViQ: Walloon agency that accredits, inspects and funds care homes, nursing homes, assisted-living residences and day-care centres in Wallonia.
Annexe 120: Walloon regulatory text within the CRWASS code that sets out the standards applicable to care homes and nursing homes.

B

Beacon: Small radio transmitter fixed to a ceiling, wall or mobile asset that periodically broadcasts a unique identifier, most often over BLE.
BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy): Low-power variant of Bluetooth standardised by the Bluetooth SIG, used in care homes for presence detection and indoor location tracking.
Call button: Physical device letting a resident request care intervention, available as a wired pear push, wall button, pendant or wristband.
Emergency button: Dedicated alert device, distinct from the standard call button, triggering a priority notification to carers in a critical situation.

C

Cabling: Wired infrastructure connecting call points, signal lamps, telephones and end devices to a central unit or a network switch.
Private cluster: Group of servers hosted in an isolated infrastructure dedicated to one vendor and its customers, as opposed to a shared public cloud.
CoCoM: Joint Community Commission, the bi-community body with authority over care facilities for the elderly in the Brussels-Capital Region.
Consent: Free, informed and specific agreement given by a resident or their legal representative to a data processing, monitoring device or restrictive measure.
Restraint: Physical or chemical measure restricting a resident's movements or freedom, subject in Wallonia to a strict formalised procedure.
Access control: Electronic devices managing door opening in a care home via RFID/Mifare badge, PIN code, biometrics or remote unlocking.
CRWASS: Walloon Code of Social Action and Health, a consolidated collection of Walloon regulations covering social action and healthcare.

D

DECT: European standard for dedicated cordless telephony on 1.88-1.90 GHz, issued to carers for nurse call reception and internal voice communication.
Decree of 30 April 2009: Walloon reference decree on housing and reception of elderly people, defining facility types, obligations and the accreditation regime.
Fall detection: Technical devices (worn sensors, environmental sensors, video analysis) that automatically identify a resident fall and trigger an alert.
Resident dignity: Founding principle of elderly rights in Belgium, guaranteeing autonomy, freedom of movement, privacy, intimacy and safety for the resident.
Professional building automation: Centralised automated control of building equipment in a care home (lighting, blinds, heating, signal lamps) with 24/7 reliability and event logging.
Dwaaldetectie: Dutch term for wandering detection, the functional equivalent of anti-errance as deployed in Flemish woonzorgcentra.

E

Healthcall ecosystem: Coherent set of twelve Healthcall software and hardware modules that equip a care home around the triptych Detection, Decision, Action.
Supervision display: Visual interface at the duty desk showing in real time the nurse call status, indoor location, alerts and service indicators.
Eddystone: Open specification published by Google in 2015 for BLE beacons, an alternative to iBeacon supporting several frame types (UID, URL, TLM).
Healthcare ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning system specific to healthcare, covering in a care home administrative management, billing, staff, rosters and stock.

F

Fall detection: English term for fall detection, widely used in the technical documentation of international manufacturers and English-language tender specifications.
Fallback: Automatic backup mechanism that takes over when a primary technology layer fails, typically switching from Wi-Fi to 868 MHz radio.
FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions, an editorial format gathering the most common questions from a target audience with concise answers.

G

Indoor location: Real-time location of a resident or mobile asset inside a building, typically using a mesh of BLE beacons and RSSI measurement.
GDPR: European Regulation 2016/679 applicable since 25 May 2018, governing the processing of personal data across the European Union.

H

Sub-gigahertz radio (868 MHz): LPWAN radio technology operating on the 868 MHz ISM band harmonised in Europe, regulated in Belgium by the BIPT and used for call buttons and sensors.
Signal lamp: External visual indicator mounted above a resident's bedroom door, showing the current call status through colour or flashing patterns.

I

iBeacon: Proprietary specification published by Apple in 2013 for BLE beacons, broadcasting a three-field unique identifier (UUID, Major, Minor).
BIPT: Belgian Institute for Postal Services and Telecommunications, the national regulator for telecommunications and radio spectrum.
INAMI / RIZIV: Belgian federal health insurance authority that funds healthcare and pays care homes a daily flat rate per resident.
Independent integrator: Provider that designs and deploys complete solutions by combining hardware components from several manufacturers, with no proprietary catalogue.
IP intercom: Audio communication over IP networks, covering in a care home resident-to-duty-desk calls, team coordination and visitor reception.
Iriscare: Bi-community public body in Brussels responsible since 2019 for the accreditation, oversight and funding of Brussels care and nursing homes.

K

Katz scale: Scale assessing a resident's functional dependency across six activities of daily living, classifying them into categories O, A, B, C, Cd, D.

L

LPWAN: Low-Power Wide-Area Network, a family of radio technologies connecting low-power devices over long ranges with limited data throughput.
LVD: Low Voltage Directive, European Directive 2014/35/EU covering the electrical safety of equipment used within defined voltage limits.

M

Care home: Collective residential facility hosting people aged 60 and over, either autonomous or semi-dependent, governed by regional regulations in Belgium.
Mifare: Family of 13.56 MHz contactless RFID standards widely used for access control and staff badges in care homes.
Mirroring (MongoDB): High-availability technique keeping several synchronised copies of a database on separate servers to allow failover without interruption.
MongoDB: Open-source document-oriented (NoSQL) database storing data as JSON-like documents, used by Healthcall for nurse call data.
MRS (French acronym for nursing home): Nursing home accredited to host highly dependent residents requiring continuous nursing and paramedical care.
MRPA (French acronym for care home for elderly people): Alternative French acronym for a care home, still used in some INAMI regulatory and funding texts alongside MR.

N

NBN S 21-100: Belgian standard on the design, installation and maintenance of automatic fire detection systems, consolidated 2025 version applicable in 2026.
Nurse call: English term for nurse call, used in technical documentation from international manufacturers and English-language architectural specifications.

O

On-premise: Software or service deployed on physical servers owned by the customer, typically in the care home's technical room, as opposed to SaaS.
Open source: Software whose source code is freely accessible, modifiable and redistributable under the terms of a recognised licence (MIT, Apache, GPL, BSD).
Oproepsysteem: Generic Dutch term for a call system in a care home, equivalent to nurse call or patient call in other languages.

P

PoE (Power over Ethernet): Technology carrying data and electrical power over the same RJ45 cable, defined by IEEE 802.3af, 802.3at and 802.3bt standards.
Time clock: Device recording timestamped clock-in and clock-out events for care staff, used for payroll and attendance evidence.
Presence: Automatic or declared detection that a carer is inside a resident's room, typically via BLE beacon reading from a DECT handset.
Call acceptance: Action by which a carer, after receiving a nurse call, signals that they are attending the resident, via DECT validation or BLE detection.
Proprietary system: Installation whose protocols, interfaces, data formats and spare parts depend on a single manufacturer, creating vendor lock-in risk.

R

Resident: Elderly person hosted in a care home or nursing home under a housing contract signed with the operator.
RFID: Radio Frequency Identification, a family of contactless radio identification technologies operating at 125 kHz, 13.56 MHz or 860-960 MHz UHF.
GDPR: European Regulation 2016/679 applicable since 25 May 2018, which governs the processing of personal data in the European Union.
Night round: Round performed by a carer during the night shift to check each resident, now often automated through BLE beacon reading.
RSSI: Received Signal Strength Indicator, a measure of received radio signal power used in BLE to estimate the distance to a beacon.

S

SaaS: Software as a Service, a delivery model where the vendor hosts and operates the software and charges customers through a subscription.
SIP: Session Initiation Protocol, an open standard defined in RFC 3261 to establish, modify and terminate multimedia sessions over IP.
SLA: Service Level Agreement, a contract setting out the performance guarantees of an IT service (availability, response times, penalties).
Sonitor: Norwegian manufacturer specialised in high-precision indoor location using ultrasound and BLE, used in hospitals and demanding care homes.
Central supervision: Control post in a care home centralising in real time nurse call, indoor location, fire alerts, access control, building automation and activity reports.

T

Resident telephone: Handset provided to a resident in their room for personal incoming and outgoing calls, typically a SIP or DECT Doro with enhanced ergonomics.
Carer handset: Handset carried by the carer to receive nurse calls, communicate in team, trigger emergency alerts and read BLE beacons.
Traceability: Ability to reconstruct the full chronology of a nurse call event: who, when, from where, accepted by whom, with what latency and how closed.

U

Uptime: Percentage of time during which a service is operational and reachable, calculated over a rolling monthly, quarterly or annual window.
UVCW: Union of Walloon Cities and Municipalities, the federation that represents, advises and trains Walloon municipalities, CPAS and inter-communal bodies.

V

Valdetectie: Dutch term for fall detection, combining in Flanders worn sensors, bed mats and environmental analysis to alert the care team.
Verpleegoproep: Dutch term for the nurse call function in a woonzorgcentrum, covering the same scope as its French and English counterparts.
Verpleegoproepsysteem: Dutch technical name for the full nurse call system deployed in a woonzorgcentrum, including buttons, signal lamps, DECT and supervision.
VoIP: Voice over IP, the transmission of voice over IP networks using the SIP protocol, covering internal telephony, external calls and intercom in a care home.

W

Wandelbeveiliging: Dutch term for wandering prevention devices, used mainly in the specialised Alzheimer units of Flemish woonzorgcentra.
Wi-Fi: Local-area radio technology on 2.4 and 5 GHz defined by IEEE 802.11, supporting IP phones, tablets, cameras and PoE signal lamps in care homes.
Woonzorgcentrum (WZC): Flemish equivalent of a nursing home, regulated by the Woonzorgdecreet and inspected by Zorginspectie and the Departement Zorg.
Woonzorgdecreet: Flemish framework decree regulating woonzorgcentra, assisted-living residences, day-care centres and home care, recast in 2019.

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