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CL IN ICAL ENGIN E E R ING


Managing devices during COVID-19 crisis


RFiD technology has been helping the clinical engineering department at University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust effectively manage medical devices during the pandemic. Now the Trust plans to roll out the technology to other areas, including sterile services.


After only recently embarking on the implementation of an RFiD Discovery system to track their 35,000 medical devices, GS1 demonstrator site University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust (UHP) is already seeing benefits of the new technology during the current coronavirus crisis.


The system has been installed as part of the Scan4Safety programme using GS1


compliant UHF tags to manage assets. It is intended to reduce the amount of time clinical staff spend looking for medical devices in the Trust’s 12-story Derriford hospital. Furthermore, it provides visibility of available assets, helps ensure that maintenance is carried out to schedule and avoids unnecessary overstocking of equipment.


Real-time visibility of devices During the current crisis, equipment from COVID wards has been given priority for tracking. With over one third of their medical devices fitted with GS1 compliant passive RFID labels replacing barcode asset labels, the Trust is already noticing a positive impact on the management of equipment. This is thanks to the high performance of two fixed Impinj Xarray readers which have been installed in the medical equipment library (MEL) and in the entrance bay to the clinical engineering department, to detect the movement of tagged equipment in and out. While this only represents a small fraction of the anticipated fixed readers which will form part of the system, UHP has already seen a dramatic benefit of monitoring these two key locations.


The clinical engineering team now has real-time visibility of all devices returned to the decontamination area of the workshops due to the RFiD Discovery web portal. This visibility is also expanded to other areas (incoming awaiting parts and outgoing shelves), allowing clinical engineering to work towards a paperless process in which device status can be established digitally very quickly. Alex Peters, clinical engineering


The clinical engineering team now has real- time visibility of all devices returned to the decontamination area of the workshops thanks to the RFiD Discovery web portal.


OCTOBER 2020


technician, assisting the implementation at UHP comments: “The system enables us to quickly establish when a device from a COVID suspected ward has been dropped off, and ensure it is dealt with appropriately. This is in combination with other measures we have put in place, such as different physical drop-off points for the wards depending on their COVID status. “The system has also been hugely beneficial for us by tracking devices as they come and go, meaning we can determine whether they are actively in use and make better informed decisions about device availability and requirements. Even more


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