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Showing results for tags 'Medical device / equipment'.
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Content ArticleIn February 2023, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) published the government’s Medical Technology Strategy. This set out how, over the next 5 to 10 years, the DHSC will ensure the health and social care system can reliably access safe, effective and innovative technologies. These technologies will enable the delivery of high-quality care, outstanding patient safety and excellent health outcomes, while making the best use of taxpayer money. One year into delivery of the medtech strategy, the DHSC present an update on their achievements towards establishing an innovation pathway, to realise our vision of right product, right price, right place.
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Content ArticleMore health systems and hospitals are looking to expand options to care for patients at home, but a new report points to some obstacles that threaten the safety of patients. ECRI, a nonprofit organisation focused on patient safety, released its annual list of the 10 leading healthcare technology hazards Wednesday. Safety challenges involving medical devices at home topped the 2024 list of technology trouble spots. ECRI also cites other challenges, including poor instruction in cleaning medical devices, sterile drug compounding, the insufficient governance of artificial intelligence in healthcare, and cybersecurity. But the concerns over the use of medical devices at home rose above all others. Marcus Schabacker, MD, president and CEO of ECRI, talked with Chief Healthcare Executive® about the potential hazards in patients using medical devices and tools at home.
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News Article
UK report reveals bias within medical tools and devices
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Minority ethnic people, women and people from deprived communities are at risk of poorer healthcare because of biases within medical tools and devices, a report has revealed. Among other findings, the Equity in Medical Devices: Independent Review has raised concerns over devices that use artificial intelligence (AI), as well as those that measure oxygen levels. The team behind the review said urgent action was needed. Prof Frank Kee, the director of the centre for public health at Queen’s University Belfast and a co-author of the review, said: “We’d like an equity lens on the entire lifecycle of medical devices, from the initial testing, to recruitment of patients either in hospital or in the community, into the early phase studies and the implementation in the field after they are licensed,.” The government-commissioned review was set up by Sajid Javid in 2022 when he was health secretary after concerns were raised over the accuracy of pulse oximeter readings in Black and minority ethnic people. The widely used devices were thrown into the spotlight due to their importance in healthcare during the Covid pandemic, where low oxygen levels were an important sign of serious illness. The report has confirmed concerns pulse oximeters overestimate the amount of oxygen in the blood of people with dark skin, noting that while there was no evidence of this affecting care in the NHS, harm has been found in the US with such biases leading to delayed diagnosis and treatment, as well as worse organ function and death, in Black patients. The team members stress they are not calling for the devices to be avoided. Instead the review puts forward a number of measures to improve the use of pulse oximeters in people of different skin tones, including the need to look at changes in readings rather than single readings, while it also provides advice on how to develop and test new devices to ensure they work well for patients of all ethnicities. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 11 March 2024 -
EventAn estimated 8% of injuries to healthcare workers in the hospital setting and 17% of worker injuries in the surgical setting are associated with scalpels. Scalpel-related injuries occur most commonly when blades are being attached to or removed from the scalpel handle. In addition to posing infection concerns, such incidents carry a high risk of causing structural damage to the hand, requiring extensive intervention and rehabilitation. Although the Occupational Safety and Health Administration mandates that employers "identify, evaluate, and implement" safer medical devices for healthcare workers, data indicates that such alternative devices are rarely used. In December, ECRI published evaluation findings for 11 scalpel blade removers—devices designed to facilitate safe blade removal and exchange in a variety of settings. Join experts from ECRI's Device Evaluation team as they discuss how this technology impacts patient safety and how to determine the best product for your needs. During this lab webcast, the following learning objectives will be discussed: The prevalence of scalpel-related injuries in healthcare Products available and ECRI's testing methodology Keys to successful implementation of the technology Register for the webcast
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Content ArticleA core responsibility of the NHS is to maintain the highest standards of safety and effectiveness of medical devices available for all patients in its care. Evidence has emerged, however, about the potential for racial and ethnic bias in the design and use of some medical devices commonly used in the NHS, and that some ethnic groups may receive sub-optimal treatment as a result. In response to these concerns, the UK Government commissioned this independent review on equity in medical devices. In its final report, the Review sets out the need for immediate action to tackle the impact of ethnic biases in the use of medical devices. Its findings and recommendations have also been published in a short animation. The Government’s response to the Review's 18 recommendations has also been published alongside its final report.
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Content ArticleFemale urologists report higher rates of work-related physical discomfort compared to male urologists. This study in the American Journal of Surgery compared ergonomics during simulated ureteroscopy—the most common surgery for kidney stones—between male and female urologists. The authors found that across all conditions, women required greater muscle activation in multiple muscle groups and had greater NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX) scores compared to men. These results suggest there may be gender differences in ergonomics during ureteroscopy based on muscle activation and subjective workload. There is therefore potential for personalising surgical workspaces and equipment.
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Content ArticlePostoperative surgical site infection is a serious problem. Coverage of sterile goods may be important to protect the goods from bacterial air contamination while awaiting surgery. This study from Wistrand and colleagues, evaluated the effectiveness of this practice in a systematic review covering five databases using search terms related to bacterial contamination in the operating room and on surgical instruments. No negative effects regarding bacterial contamination were found and the authors conclude that protection with a sterile cover decreases bacterial air contamination of sterile goods while waiting for surgery to start.
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Content ArticleConnections are critical junctures and points of access along intravenous (IV) lines. Microorganisms may colonise these connections, potentially leading to catheter-related bloodstream infections (CRBSIs). For patients, CRBSIs are a significant cause of morbidity and death, and for healthcare facilities these infectious complications lead to unnecessary costs. Safe connections may help reduce the risk of needlestick injuries for healthcare professionals (HCPs) and the occurrence of CRBSIs for patients. In this webinar recording, Nancy Trick, Registered Nurse and Adjunct Instructor at Perdue Global University in West Lafayette, USA, discusses CRBSIs and presents solutions to help prevent them. After watching this webinar, you should be able to: describe open versus closed infusion systems in VAM. briefly discuss the clinical risks of open infusion systems. discuss clinical practice change. consider how evidence-based standards of practice recommend using closed IV access/needleless connectors.
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Content Article
Left-handedness—A handicap for training in surgery? (2010)
Patient-Safety-Learning posted an article in Surgery
Left-handedness was historically considered a disability and a social stigma, and teachers would make efforts to suppress it in their students. Little data are available on the impact of left-handedness on surgical training and this report aimed to review available data on this subject. The review revealed 19 studies on the subject of left-handedness and surgical training. Key findings include: Left-handedness produced anxiety in residents and their trainers. There was a lack of mentoring on laterality. Surgical instruments, both conventional and laparoscopic, are not adapted to left-handed use and require ambilaterality training from the resident. There is significant pressure to change hand laterality during training. Left-handedness might present an advantage in operations involving situs inversus or left lower limb operations. -
Content ArticleIn 2017-18, the Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC) implemented a new operating model and delivery body for NHS procurement known as NHS Supply Chain (to replace the previous, fully outsourced model which was also called NHS Supply Chain). The new body was responsible for procuring products, warehousing, and delivering goods on behalf of the NHS. NHS Supply Chain (Supply Chain) estimates that the NHS collectively spends approximately £8 billion annually on buying medical equipment and consumables, from gloves and paper to stents and prosthetic hips.
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Content ArticleIncreasing diversity amongst surgeons results in a wide range of sizes and strengths. There are many types of biases affecting women surgeons. This study evaluates what challenges women surgeons may have with surgical equipment. Key findings include: 89% of women surgeons report difficulty with surgical instruments due to size. 71% of women surgeons report difficulty with surgical instruments due to grip strength. The study highlights a potential source of gender bias which could be addressed to improve equity for women surgeons.
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Content ArticleThis investigation explores the patient safety risk of unintended retention of surgical swabs after surgery. Surgical swabs are sterile pieces of gauze which are used to absorb bodily fluids, such as blood, during a surgical procedure. The investigation will: explore the factors associated with unintentional retained surgical swab events identify alternative safety controls to reduce the likelihood of foreign objects being unintentionally retained. The interim report analyses the findings of 31 NHS trust serious incident reports.
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Content ArticleAmbulatory infusion pumps are small, battery powered devices that allow patients to carry out day-to-day activities while receiving medication. They are used for many healthcare needs, including symptom relief during palliative care, and in different settings including hospitals, hospices and patients’ homes. Despite having audio and visual warning alarms to notify when medication is not being delivered as it should be, there is a risk that alarms can go unnoticed, particularly by healthcare staff in inpatient settings. The patient case in the Health Services Safety Investigations Body (HSSIB) investigation report is Stephen, a 45-year-old cancer patient on palliative care in hospital, who did not receive his pain relief medication for six hours. Over the course of six hours, there were eight warnings.
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News Article
Wheelchairs and weight: 'I haven't been able to weigh myself for 22 years'
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Weight management is a sensitive topic. Nevertheless, the measurement is often used as a marker to inform medical decisions or for someone's personal interest. But for many wheelchair users, accessing scales has proved near impossible. "The last time I was weighed was about 22 years ago, " Lizzie tells the BBC podcast, Access All. "I think I was about 15." As a result, now aged 37, Lizzie has been through three successful pregnancies, all without knowing how her body was adapting or how her baby was growing. Based in Devon, she has a degenerative muscle-related impairment and uses a wheelchair. This makes weighing herself on traditional bathroom scales, which require you to stand still and independently on a small platform, a challenge. There is equipment out there to help wheelchair users, like Lizzie. Chair scales enable someone to sit on a seat which records their weight and there are similar bed and hoist versions too. There are also wheel-on scales which are very large and involve subtracting the weight of the chair afterwards. But none of these seem widely available. Dr Georgie Budd, who is based in Merthyr Tydfil, says this worries her. A wheelchair user herself she appreciates how difficult it can be for people to access scales. "There's a lot of things that we use weight for in health - anaesthetics and drug dosing - and just to keep an eye on it as well for someone's general health. During pregnancy for example, if someone was losing weight I, as a GP, would actually be really quite concerned," she says. Neither NHS England nor the government have guidance for doctors nor advice on what equipment to use and no figures are kept on how many hospitals have access to such equipment and where they are. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) previously considered the issue in 2014 and requested more research be carried out. But so far nothing has been started. Read full story Source: BBC News, 13 October 2023 -
Content ArticleThis is one of a series of 'Learning from safety incidents' resources published by the Care Quality Commission (CQC). Each one briefly describes a critical issue—what happened, what the CQC and the provider have done about it, and the steps you can take to avoid it happening in your service. This edition is about ensuring the safety of people using wheelchairs in health and social care. The CQC recently prosecuted a care home provider for exposing someone using their service to a significant risk of avoidable harm, which resulted in a life-changing injury.
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Content ArticleThis alert is for action by all those responsible for the use, purchase, prescription and maintenance of medical beds, trolleys, bed rails, bed grab handles and lateral turning devices including all Acute and Community healthcare organisations, care homes, equipment providers, Occupational Therapists and early intervention teams. From 1 January 2018 to 31 December 2022, the MHRA received 18 reports of deaths related to medical beds, bed rails, trolleys, bariatric beds, lateral turning devices and bed grab handles, and 54 reports of serious injuries. The majority of these were due to entrapment or falls. Investigations into incidents involving falls often found the likely cause to be worn or broken parts, which should have been replaced during regular maintenance and servicing, but which were either not carried out or were carried out improperly.
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Content ArticleThe Health and Safety (Sharp Instruments in Healthcare) Regulations 2013 aimed to: minimise burdens on public, independent and third sector employers and ensure businesses in UK are not placed at competitive disadvantage relative to EU counterparts offer good standards of protection to healthcare workers from risk of sharps injury at work see a fall in sharps injury numbers. This post implementation review (PIR) aimed to assess the success of these objectives. It found that: stakeholder consultation provided evidence of the increasing use of safer sharps across all healthcare sectors. evidence from RCN research and HSE inspections indicates that risks to healthcare workers from sharps injuries remains high. The policy conclusion from this evidence is that the Regulations are still required, and that the Regulations’ objectives cannot be met with a system that imposes less burden to business.
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News ArticleA nurse-led trial has found that a new electronic tool could reduce the number of preventable injuries and deaths caused by wrongly inserting nasogastric tubes. The study, led by Tracy Earley, a consultant nutrition nurse at Royal Preston Hospital, tested a new fibre-optic device which can tell clinicians definitively if a nasogastric tube – which is inserted through the nose and delivers food, hydration and medicine into the stomach – has been placed correctly. Currently, to check if nasogastric tubes – also referred to as NG tubes – are in the right place, nurses have to extract bodily fluid from the patient through the tube. Clinicians then test this fluid on a pH strip to judge whether the placement is correct. Studies show that interpreting the pH level results in mistakes 12-30% of the time, and that in 46% of cases nurses are unable to draw aspirate at all. This means patients have to undergo x-rays, leaving them without nutrition or treatment for longer. The study tested a device called NGPod, which uses a fibre-optic sensor to retrieve the pH reading from the tip of the NG tube leading to a definitive 'yes' or 'no' result in terms of whether it has been placed correctly – removing the need for aspirate or interpretation from the health professional. It found that the device was as accurate as pH strip testing, and removed all of the risks associated with making subjective pH strip judgements. Read full story Source: Nursing Times, 18 July 2023
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Content Article
This blog from Matthew Bacon, CEO of TCC-CASEMIX Ltd, looks at why a multi-factorial dataset is needed to create holistic understanding of medical device performance and is the only effective means for determining the multi-factorial causes of failure. -
Content ArticleThe extent to which postintensive care unit (ICU) clinics may improve patient safety for those discharged after receiving intensive care remains unclear. This observational cohort study from Karlick et al., conducted at an academic, tertiary care medical centre, used qualitative survey data analysed via conventional content analysis to describe patient safety threats encountered in the post-ICU clinic. For 83 included patients, safety threats were identified for 60 patients resulting in 96 separate safety threats. These were categorised into 7 themes: medication errors (27%); inadequate medical follow-up (25%); inadequate patient support (16%); high-risk behaviours (5%); medical complications (5%); equipment/supplies failures (4%); and other (18%). Of the 96 safety threats, 41% were preventable, 27% ameliorable, and 32% were neither preventable nor ameliorable. Nearly 3 out of 4 patients within a post-ICU clinic had an identifiable safety threat. Medication errors and delayed medical follow-up were the most common safety threats identified; most were either preventable or ameliorable.
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Content ArticlePostpartum haemorrhage is a leading cause of maternal deaths. Now a new study points to a surprisingly simple and inexpensive solution. If the woman lies on a plastic sheet with a small transparent pouch at the other end to collect the blood, the medical team has an immediate sense of how much danger she's in and can take swift action. Read the full article, published by NPR, via the link below.
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News ArticleThousands of disabled adults and children, including those with the highest and most complex needs, are having to wait more than four months for an NHS wheelchair, official health figures show. In one part of the country more than two-thirds of patients referred to the wheelchair service face waits of more than 18 weeks, or roughly four months, to get the help they need. Besides preventing them from getting around independently, and the mental health problems that can come from the resulting social isolation, a leading disability charity says disabled people can also be left with physical pain if forced to use poorly fitting or unsuitable chairs while they wait for upgrades and adaptations. Data published by NHS England shows 16.5% of patients – one in six – were waiting longer than the NHS target time of 18 weeks for a wheelchair, equipment for a wheelchair, or wheelchair modifications between October and December last year. This represents more than 6,000 adults and almost 1,600 children, of which thousands were registered as having high or specialist needs. The figures include new patients as well as re-referred patients whose needs may have changed or whose current equipment needs adjusting or modified. Read full story Source: National World, 21 March 2023
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Content ArticleThis article highlights three questions tabled in the House of Commons relating to the Yellow Card Scheme, the system for recording adverse incidents with medicines and medical devices in the UK.
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EventIt is now clear that hormone pregnancy test Primodos, the epilepsy drug sodium valproate, and that pelvic mesh causes avoidable harm to many thousands of women and children. Yet recognising these potential harms took many years, and it is still the case that the service does not know the identities of all those affected or potentially affected. The main reason is lack of data. Knowing which patients have received which medicines and devices where, and quickly connecting longer-term outcomes, has traditionally been somewhere between impossible and extremely slow and difficult. Unnecessary harm has often been the result. So how can the NHS solve this issue? What do we know about the traditional challenges with traceability in healthcare and the shortcomings of current data collection techniques? How can it be ensured that the right products are being used for the right patient? What approaches and technologies might solve these challenges, ensuring that the right products are being used for the right patient? How could this fit into wider digital transformation work, and resulting data best be used to improve patient safety and outcomes? This HSJ webinar, run in association with GS1 UK, will bring together a small panel to consider the answers to these important questions. Register
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News Article
Patient scarred for life after botched operation left him with severe burns
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
A patient who was left scarred for life when a botched operation left him with horrific burns has received a payout after suing the NHS. Paul Hickman, 44, underwent routine surgery to improve circulation in his legs when medics at Russell Hall Hospital in Dudley, West Midlands, wrongly used a heated mattress. He ended up with significant burns on his buttocks after an alcohol-based solution came into contact with the back of both thighs and his backside. Mr Hickman, of Walsall, West Midlands, said: “I hoped that the surgery would go well and would improve my health. “However, all I remember afterwards was being in severe pain. “To be told I had suffered burns was a complete shock and at first was difficult to try and take in. I couldn’t understand how that had happened". An NHS investigation found the use of heated mattresses was stopped in the type of procedure Mr Hickman underwent after another patient was burnt in 2016. The report found the use of alcohol-based solution during Mr Hickman’s preparation for surgery and the “inappropriate use” of a heated mattress in surgery led to his burns. Read full story Source: The Independent, 4 May 2023
