East Kent Hospitals Adopt Fully Connected Glucose Solution to Enhance Patient Safety at the Point of Care

East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust, one of the largest hospital trusts in England serving a local population of over 750,000, recently installed 224 wireless-enabled Roche Accu-Chek® Inform II blood glucose meters in 130 point of care (POC) locations across seven hospital sites. Linked to the cobas® IT 1000 POC data management package, this fully connected glucose testing solution from Roche enhances patient safety by helping to ensure appropriate use of the meters and by providing a full audit trail for every test performed.

“With over 3,000 users across seven sites, implementation was challenging from a scale point of view but, thanks to the support we had from Roche, everything went smoothly,” comments POCT Coordinator, Phil Bates. “Roche worked closely with our IT team to satisfy our wireless network requirements and the support from our Roche Training Specialist has been invaluable.”

“The Training Specialist had a very flexible approach in order to make it as easy as possible for staff to attend,” Phil continues. “Training sessions could be classroom or ward based, and occasionally they were held very late or early in the day to accommodate shift workers Roche also made it easy for staff to book into sessions with an online booking system, so we always knew how many were due to attend and that sessions weren’t over-full. Furthermore, follow-up and recertification training for the coming year is already planned.”

Training of staff is vital for ensuring safe and appropriate use of equipment, and is an important aspect of demonstrating competence to meet NHS Litigation Authority and accreditation requirements. The content of the training delivered by the Roche Training Specialist at East Kent Hospitals was agreed with the POCT Coordinator, providing assurance of appropriate, site-specific and consistent training for all staff. Once trained, user identifications and barcodes are activated and only then can users access the Accu-Chek Inform II meters to test patient samples.

“cobas IT 1000 allows me to monitor safe and appropriate use of the equipment,” Phil says. “I can see at a glance who is trained and who is coming up for recertification, and I can target areas within the Trust where additional training might be required, with evidence to back this up. I couldn’t do this before.”

“Connectivity to cobas IT 1000 provides a full audit trail in far greater detail than has been possible before. It also helps us to ensure quality control is being performed on every instrument on a daily basis. If QC is not performed, the meter is locked and it cannot be used. This ensures the meters are in good working order and is particularly reassuring from a patient safety perspective. The system also generates a warning when there is an abnormal result, which prompts the user to take action. This means that, no matter who performs the test, they are prompted to communicate the result to someone who can make a decision about patient management. This is another important feature for ensuring patient safety,” Phil concludes.

“The recently published National Diabetes Inpatient Audit1, reported that out-of-target glucose levels (high and low) are not being recognised or addressed, leading to serious complications”, said Peter Jones, Marketing Manager Hospital IVD, Roche. “Through our fully connected blood glucose solution, the point of care team at East Kent is able to monitor such out-of-target results via cobas IT 1000 and, in the near future, they hope to be able to flag this vital information directly to clinicians by linking to the Hospital Information System, ensuring that patients are treated appropriately to avoid potentially serious complications.”