Smart monitoring of medicines could improve patient safety

A smart monitoring solution has been launched to help NHS hospitals improve patient safety through more precise temperature control for medicines.

Monitoring solutions manufacturer Hanwell hopes that its Selsium technology will ease stress on frontline staff and ultimately improve patient safety.

Selsium is designed to give hospitals the latest in-ward temperature technology for safe refrigerator storage of medicines, vaccines and other pharmaceutical products.

Poor temperature control of vaccine storage can have serious implications. An audit carried out by one primary care trust found that 40% of vaccines were stored outside the correct temperature range and 500 patients were recalled for new vaccinations from two GP practices.

Automated ward temperature monitoring can free up staff time and reduce the risk to patients from potentially ineffective treatments. Trusts can also save the cost of having to re-administer drugs and ensures medicine waste is minimised.

Selsium has wireless telemetry integrated into it which can be deployed over varying ward sizes, with however many fridges are required.  When the temperature within one of those fridges breaches pre-determined settings, an alarm notification and actions required are delivered to a nominated location for staff to quickly respond.

Selsium also stores the data on a local network, which can be used by senior staff to access, analyse and identify any potential trends that may cause problems in the future.

Philip Duthaler, business development executive at Hanwell, said: “There is no doubt that accurate, real-time temperature monitoring improves patient safety. For starters NHS Trusts and other healthcare bodies can avoid the risk of potentially ineffective vaccines and other medicines entering the system, and the associated costly and hugely damaging risk of recall. Not to mention the time wasted in tending to outdated monitoring systems. Hospital staff are under huge pressures, so it makes sense to ease this by removing manual reporting from day-to-day duties and instigating a much more effective and accountable automated system wherever possible.”