Mayday Healthcare NHS Trust in Croydon has been chosen to pilot a new electronic tracking system to further improve the safety of blood transfusions, the National Patient Safety Agency and NHS Connecting for Health have announced.
The pilot solution, funded by NHS Connecting for Health – the agency responsible for delivering the National Programme for IT – makes use of the latest technologies and will allow blood to be properly tracked from donation to transfusion. Patients will have wristbands that can be read electronically and they will see staff using a handheld reader to scan the details on their wristband as well as the details on blood bags to ensure that they are given the right blood.
Staff will also benefit from the extra reliability provided by the IT technology to support the manual checks they already make. The hand-held readers will also provide printed labels with patient details for blood sample tubes, which will reduce the number of incidents of incorrectly labelled tubes. Professor Michael Thick, chief clinical officer at NHS Connecting for Health, said: “The National Programme for IT is about patients and their safety. Working with Mayday Healthcare NHS Trust to pilot the national IT specification is a real step forward towards safer care. When the pilot is concluded and a full evaluation has taken place, we will have some very important lessons about its implementation and effectiveness to share with other NHS Trusts looking to use this IT specification.
“We chose Mayday to pilot the Electronic Clinical Transfusion Management System as they met all the criteria and had the best plan for piloting it.”
Dr Hilary Lumley, consultant haematologist at Mayday, said: “We are very pleased to have been chosen to host this pilot. Our current system relies on the skills and training of our staff to carry out a whole series of checks and we have a very good safety record. However, this new technology aims to improve patient safety even further and we are keen to support any system which makes transfusions safer for the hundreds of local people who need them each year.”
In November 2006, the NPSA, in partnership with the chief medical officer’s National Blood Transfusion Committee (NBTC) and SHOT (Serious Hazards of Transfusion) issued a Right patient, right blood Safer Practice Notice with recommendations to the NHS to improve the safety of blood transfusions, including the IT specification which will be piloted in this project.
Research by SHOT between 1996 and 2004 showed that five patients died as a direct result of being given incompatible blood. ABO incompatibility also contributed to the deaths of a further nine patients and caused major illness in 54 patients.
In addition, the NPSA’s reporting system for patient safety incidents, the National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS), received 41 reports of incidents directly relating to errors concerning blood samples taken for transfusion, collection of blood from the blood fridge and blood administration between November 2003 and April 2006. Two of these incidents resulted in the patient receiving the wrong blood.
