With side rooms in ever shorter supply across NHS hospitals, the Department of Health has developed an ingenious portable isolation unit that can be rapidly assembled around the bed of patients suffering infections such as those caused by MRSA and Clostridium difficile to help prevent cross-infection and simultaneously help reduce bed blocking.
Recent trials at the University College Hospital in London (UCLH), alongside a range of isolation screens, saw the various systems evaluated by clinicians, staff, patients, and visitors. Jonathan Baillie reports.
The Department of Health (DH) assigned the project for a portable isolation unit to the National Innovation Centre, which in turn appointed Renfrew Group, a Leicester-based design and innovation consultancy, to work with the Department and its stakeholders to develop ideas into working prototypes. Recently trialled over a 10-week period at UCLH, alongside both a system of screens on wheels for patients not requiring such a high degree of isolation, and roll-up plastic isolation screens initially developed by another company, KwickScreen (see panel overleaf), the new “enclosed” portable temporary isolation was designed and developed collaboratively by the DH team together with Renfrew Group, principally for patients needing airborne, as well as contact, isolation. With the UCLH trial completed in early August, the Department of Health now plans to analyse patient and staff feedback on its two systems – screen and full isolation unit – before making improvements and publishing a full design specification to enable manufacture to start, it hopes, by early-mid next year. User views on how the isolation systems, and the KwickScreen screens (co-developed with the Department of Health by Londonbased design and innovation consultancy, “The Lift”) might be improved, were collated during the trial from patients, staff and visitors who had come into contact with them by a research team within the Institute for Occupational Ergonomics at Nottingham University commissioned by UCLH consultant microbiologist Dr Peter Wilson. In conjunction with Renfrew Group, the Department of Health will next develop a full manufacturing specification for the isolation unit and screens, which it is intended will be put out to tender later this year for anticipated production to commence in early-mid 2010. The isolation unit and the screens have been developed under the Smart Ideas initiative, part of the Department of Health’s HCAI (Healthcare-Associated Infection) Technology Innovation programme headed by Paul Cryer. Established in early 2008, the programme’s goal is to speed up the development and adoption of technologies to help combat healthcare-associated infections (HCAIs) such as MRSA and C. difficile. Under the Smart Ideas umbrella, designs have emerged from ideas from NHS frontline staff who identified the most pressing needs and technology options for use in the battle against infection.
Frontline staff consulted
Log in or register FREE to read the rest
This story is Premium Content and is only available to registered users. Please log in at the top of the page to view the full text.
If you don't already have an account, please register with us completely free of charge.
