Calls for concerted barcoding drive

The Minister argues that individually barcoding many more hospital-bound items would give procurement teams a clearer, more accurate picture of what they were buying, enable fairer price comparison, and radically improve stock control in many NHS hospitals, potentially reducing NHS procurement costs by millions of pounds. Other anticipated benefits include fewer medication errors, lower risk of wrong-site surgery, and the ability to track and trace everything from surgical instruments to patient beds. HEJ editor Jonathan Baillie reports.

In calling on producers of the vast range of goods supplied into hospitals to get behind a drive whose goal is to see all products for hospital use either incorporating a standardised GS1 barcode, or identifiable via one, by the end of 2012, the Health Minister noted, perhaps with deliberate understatement, that, currently, the many different product identification systems used by NHS suppliers had resulted in “a lack of consistent information”. Consequently, some hospitals were paying substantially more than others for identical goods, while efficient stock control was rendered virtually impossible, and many vital patient care items “went missing” once inside a hospital’s doors. However, the Minister and the Department of Heath stress, it is not only ordering, and efficient management, storage, and location of hospital goods that would benefit from a uniform, standardised barcode system. In a 2010 survey, GS1 UK – the UK arm of global barcoding standards organisation, GS1, whose barcode, RFID, and other supply chain technology standards have been adopted worldwide – sought UK hospital doctors and nurses’ views on how ward services and quality of care could be improved, and how technology could enhance patient safety and efficiency. The survey found that many doctors spent over an hour each day waiting for key patient data such as notes, while a quarter of nurses found patient records and laboratory results “missing” at least once daily. The DH, and GS1 UK, with whom the Department is working closely to extend barcoding’s use in hospitals, are thus strong advocates also of further extending barcoding on patient records, and of linking a unique patient ID number to all records for a particular individual, rather than continuing to see different numbers used depending on whereabouts in the UK the individual is treated, with the number scanned and recorded at every clinical “intervention”. It would thus be scanned on admission, and again on every subsequent occasion on which the patient is given medication, or undergoes diagnostic procedures or treatment, until the point of discharge.

Extending existing work