Great Ormond Street barcodes wristbands

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust has rolled out barcoded wristbands from Dakota Healthcare.

The wristband system, which fully integrates with the trust’s existing iSoft iPM patient administration system, and is GS1 standard compliant, provides patient verification including NHS Number, hospital identification number, patient name and date of birth.

The trust said that it selected Dakota Healthcare because of its success in deploying wristband solutions at other trusts, such as Aintree University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Wirral University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.

Great Ormond Street has also selected Zebra’s HC100 printers to provide an end to end system.

Dakota Healthcare account manager, Geoff Monk, said: “This has been an extremely challenging project from day one, given the unique circumstances at the trust, its requirement to incorporate both linear and 2D barcodes on a very small area on the bands, and its thorough testing of the new Zebra neo-natal soft bands.

“The partnership with GS1 proved crucial in rolling out a solution that ticked all the boxes from a compliance point of view whilst still providing a simplistic information structure when linked to their iSoft iPM.”

Last year, E-Health Insider revealed that more than a third of NHS acute trusts in England and Wales had failed to meet The National Patient Safety Agency requirement to generate and print standardised patient wristbands for patients.

The Information Standards Board for Health and Social Care has since called for patients to wear barcoded wristbands and for trusts that do not comply by July 2011 to be penalised. A standard to this effect is due to be passed later this month.

Link: Dakota Healthcare

NPSA Safer Practice Notice on printing standardised wristbands