Temperatures kept cool in Southampton

Katey McDonald, the company’s marketing manager, outlines how the system replaces traditional methods of data collection by providing a single networked package, and describes its use at Southampton General Hospital for blood monitoring, with the help of advanced biomedical scientist and quality officer there Marie Cundall.

It all started with an overheard conversation. In less than 12 months in total, following a rigorous testing and validation scheme which still has some three months to run, DigiTrak, Digitron’s automatic wireless temperature system, will be instrumental in monitoring the blood fridges, platelet incubators and freezers in the blood bank at Southampton General Hospital, part of Southampton University Hospitals NHS Trust. At the end of this period the probes and transmitters will be fully linked into a networked DigiTrak system which already includes the hospital’s catering and nuclear medicine departments, where DigiTrak hardware components have been in use for some time. By taking this approach the blood bank unit has reaped enormous financial benefits because it has avoided incurring the expense of having to purchase the system’s software, instead needing only to invest in additional hardware. This is because, once the system is installed on a central server, additional sites or departments can easily be added. Anyone with an internet browser on the network can access information using their ID and password. Any specific user can then access their information remotely, and gather data from the transmitters they oversee. The person responsible for the smooth running of the project in the blood bank at Southampton is advanced biomedical scientist and quality officer Marie Cundall. She takes up the story: “A member of the team overheard other staff members at the hospital talking about how they were using DigiTrak and thought it could be just the answer we were looking for. We gave Digitron a call, and decided it was definitely the system for us.” A number of hospital catering departments up and down the country (including the one at the Southampton General Hospital) use the DigiTrak wireless monitoring system to monitor temperatures in the freezers and fridges in their kitchens. This allows automatic collection of critical temperature data – part of their HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) system of food safety and management, recognised as the most effective way to ensure consumer protection.

Reduced monitoring costs