Whiston Hospital finds Ultimate™ answer with Episys
Whiston Hospital finds Ultimate™ answer with Episys
Summary: Whiston Hospital is part of the St Helen’s and Knowsley NHS Trust. The hospital is a speciality regional burns unit for the North West of England. The three-star rated Trust also has a paediatrics unit and a maternity block.
Challenge: The hospital has a relationship with Episys built up over several years. Prior to working with Episys the company had labelling issues where incorrect expiry dates were being put on labels. The original Episys system eliminated this problem as the hospital could set up expiry dates within the labelling programme.
Three years on, the hospital needed to make some changes to be in line with government guidelines. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is the government agency which is responsible for ensuring that medicines and medical devices work, and are acceptably safe.
Whiston passed its MHRA inspection but it recommended that the hospital needed to look at a few areas to improve efficiency and security. These included; who printed the labels, what time they were printed and limit the number of people able to print or modify the labels. It also needed a system that could produce header and footer labels.
The hospital was also keen to improve its worksheet system. “For our normal product line that we have on a day-to-day basis, we have a master document. From this document, worksheets are photocopied and issued out when required in the morning, the required labels can then be printed off but it is still possible to print the wrong labels,” said Rob Fisher, Aseptic Manager at Whiston Hospital.
Solution: Having previously worked closely with Episys, the company visited the hospital to give a demonstration of its Ultimate technology. This is a fully featured label design and printing solution that will put the hospital in complete control of its label production.
The Ultimate technology met all of the requirements of Whiston Hospital. As well as printing labels, it can limit who can amend the labels and make changes. It will also tell the hospital who prints the labels, how many are printed and give the time of printing.