CfH seeks acute trust for blood barcoding pilot

Tags: A Acute Blood tracking CfH Information iS Mike Oxford Radcliffe Patient safety RFID Safety

17 Aug 2006

NHS Connecting for Health and the National Patient Safety Agency have announced they are looking for an acute trust to pilot IT specifications for electronic blood tracking.

A small, non-teaching hospital trust is sought for the pilot, which will begin in March 2007, to evaluate the IT guidelines developed by the NPSA. The NPSA's aim is to reduce incorrect blood transfusions by 50% by 2010.

The test will build upon the work of John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, where blood tracking Radcliffe in an effort to prevent samples for transfusion being switched or lost. The hospital completed a pilot in July last year using automated two-dimensional barcoding of every part of the blood transfusion process, with hardware supplied by Olympus osYris.

Upon the completion of the project, Mike Murphy, professor of blood transfusion medicine at Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust, had told E-Health Insider that the trust documented and prevented least one erroneous blood transfusion.

The guidelines will aim to cover not only the barcoding used at John Radcliffe but also RFID tagging of blood.

NHS CfH say the IT specifications are based on a wider project being undertaken by the NPSA's Blood Safety project. These specifications are one of four sets of guidelines, due to be fully published later this summer.

CfH have promised to release a full information pack about the pilot next month, which will include its objectives, reporting arrangements and how to apply formally. Funding will also be available to the trust to pay for the appropriate technology, maintenance and evaluation.

For more information and to express interest for pilot, contact Sarah Crossland at sarah.crossland@cfh.nhs.uk by 15 September 2006.

Links

Fully automated blood transfusion in Oxford

Readers Comments

Integration with Adminstration

Pete.marsh@whnt.nhs.uk

21 Aug 06 10:52

I realise that tracking blood products and their useage is important (we do it in Wirral) , as is tracking instrument and scope use in theatres, and prosthetic ipmlants. The process is close to the usual drug administration process. So why given tracking and administration needs across the health spectrum are we looking at a silo approach for blood products only? - Surely a integrated tracking and electronic Drug Prescribing and administration system is needed. the rules for identifying patients, appropriate skilled staff for admin, allergies, right product, right route, right schedule are generic in nature and not specific to blood products only. CfH should think for the vision in the future, even if they only pursue blood products at this time. they should publish their road map of thinking and strategy so we can all contribute and try to eliminate as many silos as possible. RFID is useful (used in Wirral for patient and product tracking), but how long have we been trying to get the retail coding of pharmacetical products standardised? - has not blood products in recent years only just moved to another bar code specification? - we need standardisation of product and labelling first.

Mystified of West Midlands

jlgh_consult@dsl.pipex.com

21 Aug 06 22:13

Did not the English National Blood Service's PULSE application do all this in the mid-nineties? I worked on it briefly ten years ago and even then is seemed to be doing pretty bulletproof centralised tracking and tracing on every bag of blood/blood product. What more is this pilot wanting to achieve?

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