WardCare+

A full-stack hospital ward management system for South African healthcare — built by a team of 4, deployed live on Azure.

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Live Demo

Try it now:https://wardcareplus.azurewebsites.net/

Log in as any role to explore the system. No sign-up required.

Role	Username	Password	What you can explore
Doctor	doctor	VtrCor87!	Patient visits, prescriptions, clinical instructions, patient folders
Nurse	nurse	VtrCor87!	Vital signs, medication administration (Sch 1–4), doctor instructions
Nursing Sister	sister	VtrCor87!	Everything a Nurse can do, plus Schedule 5+ medications
Script Manager	scripts	VtrCor87!	Prescription queue, pharmacy dispatch, delivery tracking
Consumables Manager	consumables	VtrCor87!	Stock levels, low-stock alerts, consumable orders, weekly stock takes
Ward Admin	wardadmin	VtrCor87!	Patient admissions, transfers, discharges, PDF patient folders

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About the Project

WardCare+ is a production-quality ward management system built to the ONT3010 academic specification — a realistic South African hospital IT brief covering the full lifecycle of a hospital admission: from a Ward Admin checking a patient in, through nursing care and doctor visits, to pharmacy, stock management, and discharge.

The system is designed with POPIA compliance (South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act) in mind: every data change is logged, records are soft-deleted rather than destroyed, and access is strictly scoped by role. Built as a final-year group project by a team of 4 — individual contributions are in the Team & Contributions section below.

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Features by Role

Administrator — full system control

• Manage wards, rooms, and bed assignments
• Staff management (create, edit, soft-delete)
• Medication and allergy/condition reference catalogues
• Role-aware dashboard: ward occupancy, bed availability, low-stock alerts
• Audit trail access for POPIA compliance

Ward Admin — patient lifecycle

• Admit patients (validates bed availability and doctor assignment)
• Edit patient demographics and clinical history
• Record and view patient ward movements and transfers
• Initiate and confirm discharges
• Download full patient folder as PDF
• Dashboard: recent admissions, movement history

Doctor — clinical management

• View assigned patients and their full clinical folders
• Record consultation visits with notes and next-visit scheduling
• Write prescriptions (queued for Script Manager)
• Issue nursing instructions (priority-flagged)
• Initiate patient discharge with clinical summary
• Dashboard: today's visits, pending instructions, active prescriptions

Nurse — bedside care

• Record vital signs (temperature, pulse, BP, O₂ sat, respiratory rate)
• Administer medications — restricted to Schedule 1–4 by business rule
• View and acknowledge doctor instructions
• Ward-scoped: only sees patients in their assigned ward
• Dashboard: today's vitals, pending administrations, unread instructions

Nursing Sister — senior nursing

• All Nurse capabilities
• Can administer Schedule 5+ (controlled) medications
• Dashboard includes Schedule 5 administration activity

Script Manager — pharmacy workflow

• View incoming prescription queue (bell badge for unprocessed count)
• Process prescriptions: add notes, mark sent to pharmacy
• Mark medications as received in ward
• View full prescription order history
• Dashboard: pending prescriptions, orders in transit

Consumables Manager — inventory

• View all ward consumables with current stock and reorder levels
• Low-stock alerts on dashboard
• Create and track consumable orders
• Receive stock (updates quantity on hand)
• Conduct and record weekly stock takes with variance tracking
• Stock take history and detail reports

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Architecture

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ WardCare+ MVC App │
│ │
│ Controllers (thin) Features (business logic) │
│ ┌───────────────────┐ ┌───────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │ PatientManagement │───────►│ PatientService │ │
│ │ PatientCare │───────►│ VitalSignService │ │
│ │ DoctorPatient │ │ PrescriptionService │ │
│ │ ConsumableScript │ │ PatientFolderPdfService │ │
│ │ Administration │ └───────────────────────────────┘ │
│ └───────────────────┘ │ │
│ ▼ │
│ ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │ WardSystemDBContext (EF Core 8) │ │
│ │ + AuditInterceptor (SaveChangesInterceptor) │ │
│ └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
│ │
│ ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │ ASP.NET Core Identity │ │
│ │ 7 roles · Policy-based authorization · Cookie auth │ │
│ └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
│
┌────────────────┼────────────────┐
▼ ▼ ▼
Azure SQL Azure App GitHub
Database Service Actions
▲ │
└──── deploy ────┘
(push to main →
build → publish
→ deploy)

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Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
Framework	ASP.NET Core 8 MVC
ORM	Entity Framework Core 8 (Code-First migrations)
Authentication	ASP.NET Core Identity · Cookie auth · 7 roles
Database	Azure SQL Database (prod) · SQL Server Express (dev)
PDF generation	QuestPDF 2024 (in-memory, no external process)
Input validation	FluentValidation 11 (auto-wired to model binding)
Frontend	Bootstrap 5.3 · custom CSS (layout and colour scheme)
CI/CD	GitHub Actions → Azure Web Apps (OIDC, no stored secrets)
Testing	xUnit 2.6 · Moq 4.20 · EF Core InMemory

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Key Technical Highlights

• EF Core Audit Interceptor — a SaveChangesInterceptor captures every INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE as before/after JSON snapshots stored in AuditLog. No data change goes unrecorded, as required for POPIA compliance.

• Medication schedule enforcement — medications carry a Schedule field (1–6). The rule "Nurses administer Sch ≤4 only; Nursing Sisters handle Sch 5+" is enforced at two layers: FluentValidation (fast-fail on form submit) and VitalSignService.AdministerAsync() (throws UnauthorizedAccessException at the service level).

• Service layer behind interfaces — all patient lifecycle logic lives in IPatientService/PatientService and IVitalSignService/VitalSignService. Controllers depend on the interfaces, staying thin and independently testable.

• In-memory PDF generation — PatientFolderPdfService uses QuestPDF's fluent API to render full admission folders and discharge summaries as byte[] in memory — no temp files, no external subprocess, no filesystem dependency in the cloud.

• Soft-delete everywhere — every entity has an IsActive flag. Deleting a staff member, patient, or bed sets IsActive = false; the record stays in the database for audit and recovery.

• Ward-scoped access for nurses — the Staff table stores a WardId per nursing staff member. PatientCareController resolves the nurse's ward via IdentityUserId and filters all queries to that ward only.

• Role-specific dashboards — HomeController.Index() has 7 distinct branches, each surfacing the KPIs relevant to that role (e.g. Script Manager sees pending prescription count with a bell badge; Consumables Manager sees items below reorder level; Doctor sees today's visit schedule).

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CI/CD Pipeline

Deployments are fully automated via GitHub Actions with zero stored secrets.

Push to main
│
▼
[Build — windows-latest]
dotnet build (Release) → dotnet publish → upload artifact
│
▼
[Deploy — windows-latest]
Azure login via OIDC workload identity federation (no passwords in GitHub)
Deploy artifact → Azure Web App: wardcareplus (Production slot)
│
▼
App startup
EF Core applies pending migrations automatically
Roles and demo accounts seeded if absent (idempotent)

The connection string lives in Azure App Service Configuration and overrides appsettings.json at runtime — no credentials are committed to the repository.

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Screenshots

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Local Development Setup

Prerequisites: .NET 8 SDK · SQL Server (Express or full)

# 1. Clone
git clone https://github.com/dev-k99/HospitalWardManagementSystem.git
cd HospitalWardManagementSystem/WardSystemProject
# 2. Restore dependencies
dotnet restore
# 3. Configure local settings — create appsettings.Development.json:
{
"ConnectionStrings": {
"WardConn": "Server=YOUR_SERVER;Database=WardSysemDB;Trusted_Connection=True;TrustServerCertificate=True"
},
"SeedAdmin": {
"Username": "admin",
"Email": "admin@wardcare.co.za",
"Password": "YourAdminPassword123!"
}
}
# 4. Apply migrations
dotnet ef database update
# 5. Run — migrations and demo seed run automatically on first launch
dotnet run

Navigate to https://localhost:PORT — the login page loads first. The admin account and demo role accounts are created on startup.

To populate the database with realistic demo patients, wards, and clinical data, run seed_demo_data.sql against your SQL Server instance using SQL Server Management Studio or Azure Data Studio.

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Team & Contributions

Developed as a final-year group project by a team of 4.

Contributor	Area of Ownership
Kwanele	Azure cloud deployment · GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline · Azure SQL configuration · UI layout and colour scheme · Doctor- Patient Subsytem
Kamva	[Patient_Management_SubSystem]
Karabo	[Consumables_SubSystem]
Marcus	[PatientCare_SubSystem]

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Data Model Overview

25+ tables covering the full ward workflow:

Ward → Room → Bed ↔ Patient (bidirectional bed assignment)
Patient → VitalSign
→ MedicationAdministration
→ DoctorInstruction
→ DoctorVisit
→ Prescription → PrescriptionOrder (pharmacy workflow)
→ PatientMovement
→ Allergy · MedicalCondition · PatientFolder
Consumable → ConsumableOrder
→ StockTake → StockTakeDetail
Staff ↔ AspNetUsers (via IdentityUserId — links Identity auth to clinical staff)
AuditLog (append-only, every table mutation recorded)

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License

Academic portfolio project. Not licensed for production medical use.