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News Article
Seven NHS hospital trusts to receive share of £8.7m for e-prescribing
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
A further £8.7million is to be dished out to seven NHS hospital trusts to introduce digital records and e-prescribing. The money is part of a £78million investment which was announced in February 2018 and aims to accelerate the roll out of electronic prescribing systems across the NHS. The latest funding is part of the third wave of the investment, which will be handed out over three years. In 2018/ 19, £16.2 million was awarded, £29.4 million was given in 2019/20 and another £12 million will be invested later this year. The seven trusts which will benefit from this latest round of finding are: Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust (£1.7m) Solent NHS Trust (£988,000) Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust (£637,000) United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust (£1.26m) North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Trust (£2m) East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust (£1.6m) Birmingham Community NHS Trust (£531,000) National director of patient safety, Dr Aidan Fowler, said: “Patient safety is of paramount importance and is something we are continuously looking at ways to improve, whether through new technology, such as the introduction of electronic prescribing, or by building a safety culture where all NHS staff feel supported and safe to speak up.” Read full story Source: Digital Health, 1 October 2020 -
News Article
Need for tech to reduce medication error and improve patient safety
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Omnicell UK & Ireland, a leading provider of automated healthcare and medication adherence solutions, hosted a health summit on the eve of World Patient Safety Day, to discuss the impact of medication errors on patients and the NHS. The session focussed on the role technology can play in preventing such issues. The summit, this year held via webinar, comes off the backdrop of the Department of Health and Social Care disclosing that in England 237 million mistakes occur every year at some point in the medication process. These errors cause serious issues for patient safety, but also place a significant cost burden on an already stretched NHS. The 2019 Patient Safety Strategy published by NHS England and NHS Improvement also found the NHS failed to save 11,000 lives a year due to safety concerns with the cost of extra treatment needed following incidents being over £1bn. A number of high-profile panel members answered a series of questions from the audience on solutions and best practice to improve patient safety with the aim of debating and sharing ideas on how to meet challenges and the impact of COVID-19. One of the panelists, Patient Safety Learning's Chief Digital Office Clive Flashman, agreed with the other panel members that the NHS had become more collaborative and familiar with technology since Covid: “We’ve seen a definite increase in telehealth and telemeds. Covid has forced cultural blockers that were there before to be removed out of necessity. There has been a growth in robotic pharmacy automation to free up staff time from high volume administration tasks to do more complex work that adds value for patients.” But with the second-wave of COVID-19 still a very real threat he advised: “We don’t want to wait until the next wave to learn a lesson – we need to learn lessons now. Quality Improvement Leads should be focussed on what went right and what went wrong over that period between March and May. They need to be looking at what we can learn from that now and what we can do differently next time. If we don’t do that, we won’t succeed in the second wave where we might fail.” Ed Platt, Automation Director, Omnicell UK & Ireland, added: “Challenges within the NHS throughout Covid has forced them to embrace technology and drive innovation." "It’s important that when things go back to normal, we don’t go back to the same status quo. We need to invest in the right infrastructure in hospitals so unnecessary demands and stress are not put on pharmacy, supply managers and nurses so they are free to focus on patient care not administration tasks." Read full story Source: NHE, 17 September 2020 You can watch the webinar on demand here -
Content ArticleThe COVID-19 crisis has created a watershed moment for the NHS, demanding a reappraisal of how essential services are delivered to the public. Even prior to COVID-19, the NHS recognised a pressing need to rethink healthcare using user-centred design principles, based on populations, not organisations. With the advent of the pandemic that pressing need has become an operational imperative. Digital capability has been and will continue to be a key part of transformation, but will only work when aligned with reforms in other key enablers such as financial flow, workforce planning and regulation. Many industries have already made the shift to enabling collaboration and innovation through more agile models of delivery by embracing technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT) and/or flexible and secure forms of (multi) cloud storage. Health, on the other hand, until now has introduced new technologies with the objective of improving existing pathways and service delivery models. There is now an opportunity to reimagine healthcare, driving true transformation enabled by digital capabilities.
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Content ArticleThis special Patient Safety Network Perspective compiles findings and insights into a series of case studies from interviews and written responses from leaders at three different health systems who had to increase their telehealth capacities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Content ArticleAn overview of the industry study by MxD and IAAE between February and June 2021 funded by FDA Office of Counterterrorism and Emerging Threats. The aim of the study was to gain an initial baseline to deepen FDA’s understanding of the factors that impact a manufacturer’s decision to invest in and adopt digital technologies by illuminating both perceived and demonstrated barriers from technical, business, and regulatory perspectives, and related cybersecurity considerations.
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Content ArticleProgress enables the creation of more automated and intelligent machines with increasing abilities that open up new roles between humans and machines. Only with a proper design for the resulting cooperative human–machine systems, these advances will make our lives easier, safer and enjoyable rather than harder and miserable. Starting from examples of natural cooperative systems, the paper from Flemisch et al. investigates four cornerstone concepts for the design of such systems: ability, authority, control and responsibility, as well as their relationship to each other and to concepts like levels of automation and autonomy.
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Content ArticleThe review by the Cabinet Office's Major Projects Authority (MPA) on the NHS National Programme for IT.
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Content ArticleIn healthcare, digital solutions have been adopted with zeal, but there is paucity of evidence for benefits and harms of these solutions. The impact, immediate or long term, of digital applications on healthcare has not been assessed. With the overwhelming numbers and types of digital solutions, it is becoming increasingly important to develop evidence-based insights for the integration of these solutions in routine medical care. Digitalisation can certainly empower and enable patients and physicians to achieve health objectives. The World Health Organization has released guidance for digital health after a critical review of available evidence for the benefits, harms, acceptability, feasibility, resource use and equity considerations of digital health interventions. This guidance can potentially inspire and impact future research endeavours for digital applications. Tarveen Jandoo reviews the guidance in context of the current research situation and insights are shared for researchers engaged in the design and assessment of digital interventions.
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Content ArticleSystems and software engineering contribute not only to advancing and improving the delivery of healthcare but also to doing it more safely than has been the case in the past.
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Content ArticleScienceDirect uses heuristic and machine-learning approaches to extract relevant information from their extensive collection of content. They compile this information on a topic-by-topic basis providing the reader both depth and breadth on a specific area of interest. This collection of research and data focuses on biomedical technology assessments.
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Content ArticleThis article from Peden et al. reviews of some of the key topics and challenges in quality, safety, and the measurement and improvement of outcomes in anaesthesia. Topics covered include medication safety, changes in approaches to patient safety, payment reform, longer term measurement of outcomes, large-scale improvement programmes, the ageing population, and burnout. The article begins with a section on the success of the specialty of anaesthesia in improving the quality, safety, and outcomes for our patients, and ends with a look to future developments, including greater use of technology and patient engagement.
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Content ArticleStudies comprehensively assessing interventions to improve team communication and to engage patients and care partners in intensive care units are lacking. This study from Dykes et al. examines the effectiveness of a patient-centered care and engagement program in the medical ICU. They found implementation of a structured team communication and patient engagement program in the ICU was associated with a reduction in adverse events and improved patient and care partner satisfaction.
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Content ArticleHealth IT (HIT) systems are increasingly becoming a core infrastructural technology in healthcare. However, failures of these systems, under certain conditions, can lead to patient harm and as such the safety case for HIT has to be explicitly made. This study from Habli et al., published in Safety Science, focuses on safety assurance practices of HIT in England and investigates how clinicians and engineers currently analyse, control and justify HIT safety risks. Two areas of strength were identified: establishment of a systematic approach to risk management and close engagement by clinicians; and two areas for improvement: greater depth and clarity in hazard analysis practices and greater organisational support for assuring safety. Overall, the dynamic characteristics of healthcare combined with insufficient funding have made it challenging to generate and explain the safety evidence to the required level of detail and rigour. Improvements in the form of practical HIT-specific safety guidelines and tools are needed. The lack of publicly available examples of credible HIT safety cases is a major deficit. The availability of these examples can help clarify the significance of the HIT risk analysis evidence and identify the necessary expertise and organisational commitments.
