Patient safety
“Barcodes are an essential component in the implementation and optimisation of medicines supply technology, supporting closed loop supply and administration, expiry date checking, batch tracing and potentially the verification of authenticity,” says Ric Bowers, lead clinician for medicines procurement and supply, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.
Link three: the bedside It is mid-morning on a medical ward. Medicines are due. A nurse picks up an oral analgesic and scans it. No read. The nurse checks the expiry manually, enters the details directly into the electronic patient record and moves on. It takes longer, relies on accurate manual input under pressure and batch is not captured. One small opportunity for error that scanning would have closed. Now consider the same round when the pack carries a 2D barcode. One scan checks the right patient against the right medicine, verifies expiry against the administration time and writes to the patient record automatically. The seconds are the same. The safety is not. The case for treating scanning as a clinical safety control is clear. Where BCMA is in place, it directly protects against the most common scanning-preventable errors: wrong patient and wrong medicine. The World Health Organization estimates that medication errors cost health systems around 42 billion US dollars each year, and NHS England’s provisional Never Events data for 2024 to 2025 recorded 403 serious, largely preventable incidents, including medication errors. Scanning reduces reliance on memory at busy times, supports multidisciplinary teams in sharing a consistent view of what was given and when, and creates a clear record for investigation and learning. “We understand the request from the Chief
Pharmaceutical Officers to reinstate the 2D barcodes, and we believe that this will help us to better serve our NHS customers. We
appreciate the impact this has for both staff and patients, particularly when it comes to supporting point of care scanning for dispensing and administration to improve patient safety,” comments Andy Stewart, Managing Director, Desitin Pharma.
Link four: traceability and recall Every scan builds a record. When a recall is issued, that record transforms the response. Instead of a broad instruction to check wards, trolleys and fridges, pharmacy teams can search by batch and location using electronic data records. The system identifies exactly which patients received affected stock and where remaining units are held. A targeted action replaces a blunt one. The difference is measurable. In one large
teaching trust, average recall completion time fell from more than eight days to under thirty- five minutes once scanning was embedded. Across the Scan4Safety demonstrator sites, teams reported 140,000 hours released to care, almost five million pounds of recurrent inventory savings and nine million pounds of
non-recurrent reductions. Clean identifiers allow robots, automated cabinets and clinical software to work as designed. When identifiers are missing or wrong, people compensate, and that compensation takes time and introduces variability that good data would have prevented. Traceability also closes the loop on learning. A complete data trail makes it easier to identify precisely where something went wrong, whether at manufacture, in transit, in the store or at the bedside, and to act on that insight systematically rather than anecdotally.
A proven system, not a new build None of this requires new technology in hospitals. GS1 standards have powered retail and other sectors for more than fifty years, enabling billions of products to be identified, scanned and traced by more than 60,000 organisations across the UK. The GS1 DataMatrix is recommended or mandated for medicines identification in more than seventy countries and underpins both the EU Falsified Medicines Directive and the United States Drug Supply Chain Security Act. It encodes the product identifier, batch or lot, expiry and where relevant a serial number in one compact symbol, captured in a single scan. Manufacturers should ensure the GS1 DataMatrix forms a consistent and integral part of product packaging from the outset: assigning identifiers correctly, encoding batch and expiry in the standard way, verifying print quality on production samples and testing that symbols scan reliably on equipment hospitals actually use.
The national picture Medicine shortages have become a fixture of NHS operational life. Reliable 2D barcodes on every pack make real-time stock visibility possible across wholesalers, pharmacy stores
October 2026 I
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