t
TRACEABILITY
Tracking initiative progressing well
Derby Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, a leader in improving patient safety, reducing clinical variation and driving operational efficiency in theatre, has implemented GS1 barcodes in an effort to improve patient safety and realise cost efficiencies. Glen Hodgson, head of healthcare at GS1UK, examines what benefits this has brought to the Trust.
Three years ago, Derby Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust realised they needed to make a change in their theatres. Their acute hospital, the Royal Derby, had been built over 10 years ago with 35 operating theatres, considered more than enough at the time, and now they were all full. Short of building more theatres, they needed to find a solution that would maximise their efficiency and usage – without compromising patient safety. The solution was to track and trace every person, every product and every place that formed part of an operating procedure, and that was done using GS1 barcodes.
Leading the Scan4Safety programme
Derby started this process three years ago, before the Department of Health announced their eProcurement strategy. Released in 2014, the strategy outlined a range of measures for greater transparency and efficiency in NHS procurement, including a mandate that means any service or product procured by an acute Trust in England must be compliant with GS1 standards. In 2016, this was backed up by a £12 million investment from the Department of Health for six demonstrator Trusts who would show the benefits, and challenges, of GS1 implementation. Derby were chosen as one of those Trusts and are part of the programme, now known as Scan4Safety. As part of the Department of Health
Derby Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust started the process of implementing GS1 barcodes three years ago.
mandate, these Trusts are demonstrating the three principle uses for GS1 standards in acute care – known as the core enablers. While suppliers to Trusts must become GS1 compliant, Trusts have also been asked to use GS1 standards to track three key areas: every person, every product and every place in their hospitals. Specifically, this means the use of GS1 barcodes for patient and staff identification, catalogue management and location numbering. When all products, devices, locations, staff and patients are scanned, for example at the beginning of an operating procedure, the data provided gives an accurate picture of everything you’d want to know: who did what to who, and where and when it took place.
What Derby now have is a lot of data. Since starting three years ago they now have over 97,000 theatre episodes recorded. It’s a major database they can use to identify patient outcomes and differences in clinical treatment.
SEPTEMBER 2017
Starting in theatre For Derby, even before they received funding from the Department of Health, the need to make a change in their theatres was clear. Not only to make them more efficient, but to minimise risks to patients. As with many Trusts, they had a problem with managing product safety recalls. Traceability was a manual, paper-based process that was time- consuming for clinicians and inadequate for patient safety. And they wanted a solution that wouldn’t just work in theatre but that could eventually be rolled out to their wards and clinics. It was clear that barcodes would be essential to collect accurate, timely and comprehensive information needed to address these issues.
Three years of achievements
So what have Derby achieved in the three years using GS1 standards? They’ve implemented scanning across all their theatres, endoscopy and their cardio cath labs. In these areas, everything and everyone involved in a procedure has a GS1 barcode that is scanned and tracked to the patient. This means they scan the patient, they capture the time the procedure starts, from the anaesthetic all the way through into recovery, and then out of recovery to the ward. They scan the location, who is present and what job they’re actually doing, the type of anaesthetic used and anything that happens to the patient, in particular anything that’s implanted. This gives them full traceability. So now, when a recall takes place, Derby can not only identify any of the products still held in the Trust but, more importantly, they can identify all patients that may have been affected by the products – even patients with implants who are now at home. This makes it quicker and easier for the required actions to take place. Where this was a manual process before, taking an average of 50 hours per patient to get this information, now it takes them 30
WWW.CLINICALSERVICESJOURNAL.COM I 45
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72
