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NHS Grampian enhances patient safety with point of care blood gas service
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Roche Diagnostics (UK)
: 20 April, 2012 (Application Story) |
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NHS Grampian is standardising its point of care (POC) blood gas analysis throughout its hospitals, with the installation of 13 new Roche cobas b 221 blood gas analysers. |
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The robust analysers require minimal maintenance and perform reliably and consistently in a variety of POC settings. By providing a full audit trail of results, they allow NHS Grampian to meet important clinical governance standards, while ensuring patient safety and high quality patient care.
"We required a blood gas service that would not only provide rapid and accurate blood gas results, but that would also perform reliably in busy wards for 24 hours a day, while requiring minimal maintenance and intervention from a laboratory perspective," explained Dr Elaine Davidson, Clinical Scientist responsible for Clinical Biochemistry POC testing in NHS Grampian. "The Roche solution has allowed NHS Grampian to standardise blood gas equipment across its sites. This aids stock control and deliveries, in addition to simplifying user training and maintenance by the laboratory team."
"Mandatory patient identification has helped to improve patient safety," Dr Davidson continued. "Results can be recalled on the cobas b 221 analysers quickly and easily, if required, and correctly identified with stored patient demographics. We are now working towards integration of results into the electronic patient record. This will further enhance patient safety by eliminating the need to tape or transcribe results into patient notes."
"The cobas bge link software has been vital to this installation. The status of each analyser can be viewed, and basic maintenance performed, from a central location. This allows the laboratory team to provide remote support 24 hours a day. Operator identification, authorisation and certification is also controlled using the cobas bge link software, which provides a full audit trail of results and allows us to address many aspects of clinical governance."
The cobas b 221 blood gas analysers are located in the laboratory, emergency department, intensive therapy unit (ITU), respiratory ward, high dependency units, acute medical assessment units, labour wards and neonatal units throughout NHS Grampian. Consequently, the analysers must be sufficiently versatile to meet vastly different requirements: for instance, the labour wards require results on small volume, non-homogeneous samples; the neonatal wards require frequent results on pre-term, low birth weight babies and therefore low volume and accuracy are vital; and the ITU has three analysers performing upwards of 700 blood gases per week, so they must be robust enough to withstand this constant high throughput, as well as producing reliable and accurate results.
"The touch screen enables users to select the required combination of parameters at a single touch, and to depict the volume of sample required for that combination of parameters," Dr Davidson concluded. "This allows the neonatal units, for example, to have more control and to prioritise effectively with low volume samples." |
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