25.09.13
Blood tracking
Source: National Health Executive Sept/Oct 2013
Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has been taking part in a pilot project with NHS Blood & Transplant to automate blood tracking and delivery, ensuring the trust has the right amount of blood product. NHE spoke to Teresa Benson, senior biomedical scientist, to find out more.
NHS Blood & Transplant (NHS BT) has been piloting its ‘integrated transfusion service’ (ITS) with four NHS hospital trusts in an attempt to transform blood management, through better stock handling and supply chain optimisation.
Blackpool Victoria Hospital is one of the sites where it’s taking place, and senior biomedical scientist Teresa Benson explained to NHE how the old manual system of staff counting up blood stocks each morning and sending an order for a lunchtime delivery has been automated.
“The computers here at Blackpool and at NHS BT talk to each other,” she said. “They look at what stock we’ve got and it’s ordered automatically so we get to the same level each day.
“Before the project started, NHS BT looked at the data for the previous eight to ten months at Blackpool, and they saw what we actually used each day and what levels they thought we should be at. Our lab manager, Elaine Addison, agreed with the project team on what levels for each blood type we would have.
“For example, we have to have 65 O Positive. If we’ve got 60, they send us five. If we’ve only got 50, because we’ve had a busy night, then they send us 15. But it’s done automatically for us now; it just arrives on the lunchtime van.
“It saves us time and resources and also avoids over-ordering and under-ordering. We haven’t run out of anything and the pilot has been going very well.”
If the pilot project is extended and rolled out nationally, it could means NHS BT keeping automatic track of blood stocks at every hospital, meaning during shortages of one blood type, it could be better shared between hospitals. It could also help reduce wastage of blood, which is a precious resource that the NHS strongly encourages people to donate.
The blood is scanned and tracked via electronic delivery notes, which is integrated with Blackpool’s internal system, BloodTrack by Haemonetics, which monitors blood going in and out of their own fridges. That also ensures a full audit trail for the MHRA’s purposes.
The trust gets two deliveries a day, at lunchtime and 7pm, because it’s a large haematology leukaemia tertiary centre and a cardiac centre for the North West region.
Benson said: “We used to have ‘ad-hoc deliveries’, if we perhaps didn’t order enough at lunchtime we might run short in the afternoon. But now our stock are always at the right level. We also keep more platelets, because when we and NHS BT looked at all our statistics, they saw that actually each day we weren’t getting enough platelets in. Now we have four bags of platelets that they send us each day, and when we have urgent cases come in or theatre need urgent platelets we’ve got more platelets in stock so the product is more available for our patients.”
The original pilot was supposed to run until the end of June, but has been extended until December, Benson said, because NHS BT wants more data and because the project at Blackpool started later than originally intended.
“All the staff have taken well to the system and they really like the replenishment,” Benson said.
Even if NHS BT chose not to fund a full roll-out of the project, Benson said, the trust will keep the delivery note aspect. “But we’d have to go back to doing our own counting up and everything. We’ve gained greatly from all the statistics by taking part – it’s shown us things that we didn’t realise, it’s monitored our stock, it’s shown us what we use more of, and we’ve really learnt a lot of valuable information from doing the project. It’s been well worth it.”
Lynda Hamlyn, chief executive at NHS Blood and Transplant (pictured, second from left), recently visited the trust to see the project in action, and said it was a great example of two NHS organisations working together to improve quality and treatment.
“A lot of time and effort has been put in by both NHSBT staff and those at Blackpool Victoria Hospital to get this up and running and fully functioning,” she said.