As one of the Scan4Safety demonstrator sites (involved in the Department of Health and Social Care programme), North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust (NTH) embarked on embedding GS1 standards across the trust.
To fully meet the requirements of the programme, a point-of-care scanning solution was necessary to facilitate the efficient capture and recording of events taking place during each episode of patient care.
However, while adopting point of care scanning, staff found that there was no all-encompassing solution available to meet their needs.
The trust decided to develop its own solution and looked to produce an easy-to-use, accessible app that staff could use for all of their scanning requirements.
The proposed solution would allow all of the data collected to be accessed and stored in one central repository so that the right investigational product and/or kit could go to the right patient.
NTH instead developed CareScan+ to meet staff needs, built by the NHS, for the NHS.
"Overall, its efficiency gains are second to none. CareScan+ frees up approximately 15 minutes of a theatre personnel’s time per case, which, in turn, aids the turnaround time and associated benefits that this has on our patients and for the trust."
Since its implementation, NTH has been able to improve the speed and efficiency of its product recalls, provide additional insight to procedure costs, and has a greater awareness of product consumption and asset utilisation.
With CareScan+ in place, the time taken to identify patients affected by a product recall is now minutes and hours instead of weeks and months. Plus, the real time patient safety alerts also provide instant feed back to clinicians preventing unnecessary harm to patients.
Staff can now also better track and trace their vital assets to enhance traceability and provide insight into space utilisation.
NTH hopes to be able to make CareScan+ available to other NHS trusts embarking on their own adoption journeys.
The CareScan+ solution has also recently become a GS1 UK-approved product, as part of the GS1 UK partner programme. You can find out more about CareScan+ on their partner profile page here.