TRACK & TRACEABILITY
NHS to replace those lost instruments. At £100,000 per hospital inaction could cost your hospital £500,000 over five years in losses. It will then cost you another £500,000 to replace these instruments. £1 million is a big loss to your hospital. If no action is taken at all to control these losses, then this figure will roll on and on ad infinitum. If we continue to have delays in
theatres due to incorrectly assembled or unavailable instrument sets then we are looking at a hospital loss of £500 per hour (GS1 Healthcare Use Group). How many times do these types of incidents occur in your establishment? What cost to patient safety and cancelled operations?
When dealing with supplementary instruments many hospitals inform us that they contribute to extra process during packaging and sterilisation. They frequently go missing or are placed back incorrectly into sets. If these events could be avoided, we suggest that the financial cost to the hospital could be considerably reduced. If you had the ability to have an accurate overview of all instruments in your trays and in stock, would that
influence your purchasing decisions when ordering trays and instruments from suppliers? We believe that having this accuracy would reduce the amount of unnecessary stock that you purchase. This is not a one-off saving, it is in fact an ongoing saving that could amount to significant sums.
If you know what is happening to your instruments individually you can track the quality of those instruments. You can track the repair cycle of that instrument and certainly track its warranty. You may find that an instrument that is more expensive initially, but better quality is in fact less expensive than one which has limited life and a poor record of repairs. If you outsource your sterilisation to
a third party have you ever considered the costs of disputes between each party when trays are incorrectly managed? I am sure that this again is significant and should not be ignored. Ultimately, we see patient safety as the driver to a system such as this, as in any adverse event the hospital can quickly identify, down to instrument level, what action to take in order to prevent any further harm to either
patient or staff and the hospital systems itself.
An RFID tracking system gives you the tools to track and trace instrumentation at every level. It will improve patient safety, inventory management and help improve productivity. It has more than 140 statistic tools to help you manage your processes at all levels. By implementing a system such as this we firmly believe that you will see very real cost reductions year on year and a more productive workplace.
References
1 Innovation award for development and realisation of a remarkable new 4.0 industrial solution award
https://www.asanus.de/wp-content/ uploads/Urkunde-Innovationspreis.pdf
2 NHS Institute for innovation and improvement-The productive operating theatre.
http://harmfreecare.org/ wp-content/files_mf/Evaluation-of- The-Productive-Operating-Theatre- programme-FINAL.pdf
3 GS1 UK Healthcare user group
https://www.gs1uk.org/about-us/our-work- with-industry/healthcare-user-group
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