Medical devices management
Transforming patient care with medical asset tracking
Rob Kinnersley discusses the benefits of leveraging technology to accurately and efficiently track vital hospital equipment in healthcare environments.
Years of mounting pressures on the NHS have taken their toll, with long waiting times, understaffing, and issues with retention combined with chronic underfunding all having a significant impact. This is a familiar story in the press. The challenge of missing medical equipment across hospital Trusts only adds to the headache as staff spend precious time searching for items daily, and many have to be replaced at a great financial cost. With the support of innovative technology,
there is an opportunity to overcome this challenge and empower healthcare staff to locate, manage, and utilise medical equipment more efficiently. Research from the NHS Transformation
Directorate found that hospitals using technology to locate medical equipment reduced the time to find a tagged asset to less than 25 seconds and, as a result, released over 140,000 hours of clinical time back to patient care.
Consequently, more and more hospitals
across the UK are looking to deploy technology solutions to ensure critical medical equipment is traceable inside and outside the hospital environment – enabling clinicians to quickly locate devices and concentrate on providing better healthcare.
Counting the cost of missing medical equipment The cost of lost equipment can hit hard; the NHS spends £10 billion a year on MedTech,2
including
syringes, wheelchairs, and medical imaging equipment such as X-ray machines. T34 syringe drivers, for example, can each cost around £1,500, accumulating to a significant amount over time, as hundreds can be misplaced throughout a year. While items like these can be considered low-cost by clinical staff or patients, they can collectively leave hefty dents in waning medical equipment budget allocations. Figures reveal NHS Trusts across England spend millions of pounds each year buying new walking aids and wheelchairs because nearly 80% of them are not returned by patients.3 According to UCLH, hospitals can save up to
40
www.clinicalservicesjournal.com I June 2023
£46,000 a year by refurbishing returned walking aids to be used by future patients. To combat this challenge, many Trusts have to buy more of everything – but this is a sticking plaster solution that will add unnecessary costs to the NHS.4
emergency, the panoramic view enables the CE team to improve patient flow. This is a result of utilising the right equipment allowing beds to be freed up for the next patient. Medical equipment won’t always remain on
It is no secret that medical equipment is expensive. It is also often difficult to source and maintain and, therefore, much more valuable than first perceived at face value. Chesterfield Hospital, for example, has a team of 4,500 staff and 150 volunteers, overseeing 550 beds across 20 wards used to care for 22,000 patients that receive complex surgery each year.5 It is not easy to keep track of critical medical equipment on a site of this size. Before deploying Idox’s iAssets tracking solution, the clinical engineering (CE) teams responsible for audit and facilities management spent hours manually logging equipment locations on paper. The team also had to order new equipment to replace missing or stolen equipment. With a complex network of hires and loans
to consider, iAssets has considerably alleviated much of the pressure on teams tasked with complete oversight and device servicing. As well as immediately reducing costs and ensuring quick delivery of vital equipment in an
site but is loaned out to organisations within the community – adding another dynamic to effectively tracking these devices and preventing them from going missing. With the Government’s ambition to boost care in the community through virtual wards, and accelerating access to innovative technologies for managing health at home through its MedTech strategy, tracking medical assets throughout the community is more essential than ever.
Additionally, with the Government’s intention
to invest more in supporting discharge from hospitals into the community to free up hospital beds, via the Adult Social Care Discharge Fund, tracking the equipment the patient goes home with is key to delivering value and making it available for the next patient. Small actions can have big consequences,
especially in healthcare environments. A defibrillator not being placed back in its usual location could be disastrous when clinical teams
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