NHS hospitals will use GS1 System of standards to improve patient safety

LONDON, 14 January 2008 – GS1 UK, the independent global supply chain data standards and solutions organisation, has announced that its NHS CfH initiative is driving momentum in the UK healthcare sector with 70 hospitals signing up to improve patient safety.  The NHS hospitals, which include Chelsea and Westminster, University Hospital of South Manchester and University College London have joined to address the threat posed by transferable diseases through the cross contamination of surgical instruments and to eliminate problems caused by wrongly issued medication.

NHS Connecting for Health (CfH), a Department of Health agency set up to encourage the use of technology in the NHS to improve patient care and services, is working with GS1 UK to engage and inform hospitals on the importance of using automatic identification and the GS1 System of standards.  The automatic identification enabled by bar codes which adhere to GS1 System standards allows hospitals to trace the lifecycle of surgical instruments, including the verification of the decontamination and sterilisation process, and to determine for which operation instruments were used.

The use of standardised auto-identification technologies can also lead to significant cost savings.  It is estimated that the NHS has at least 9 million individual surgical trays in circulation containing tens of millions of surgical instruments. Lost instruments can cost a 500-bed hospital over £100,000 per year.

For hospitals’ pharmaceutical distribution procedures, 50 percent of the estimated 72,000 deaths in the NHS are caused by medication errors.  34 percent of these errors are associated with drug administration. Medication errors occur as a result of a lack of machine readable codes, which significantly increases the risk of human visual identification errors. In addition to this, adverse reactions to medication cost approximately £2 billion a year in additional hospital stays and the NHS pays out approximately £400 million each year to settle clinical negligence claims.*

GS1 UK is providing a number of resources to support NHS hospitals signed up to the initiative including a series of workshops across the UK to educate hospitals on how the GS1 System can work within their facilities and departments such as decontamination centres.  Application guidelines on sterile surgical instrument tracking and pharmaceutical manufacturing have also been made available to hospitals that register with GS1 UK.

"Hospitals cannot afford to ignore the issue of traceability or how we manage our most valuable assets," says Wayne Spencer, an advisor to the National Decontamination Programme. "There is a need for all instruments to be properly coded in order to make tracking and traceability a reality and to help eradicate any errors that could put patient's lives at risk. I welcome the support that GS1 UK is giving to hospitals to enable them to improve their efficiency and to give patients the best possible care."

“The NHS CfH is providing NHS hospitals in England an opportunity to join GS1 UK by centrally funding their membership so that they can start coding their application areas using the globally unique GS1 standards to improve patient safety and to keep in line with the government’s ‘Coding for Success’ policy,” says Neil Lawrence, NHS CfH Auto-ID Project Manager.

“A more responsive, efficient and accurate healthcare supply chain will reduce errors, process time and cost,” says Roger Lamb, Healthcare Business Manager of GS1 UK.  “More importantly, every time a new hospital signs up to this initiative we can make a real difference to patient safety so we would encourage healthcare professionals across the UK to get on board.”

Notes to Editors:

About GS1 UK

GS1 UK has driven innovation in the supply chain for over thirty years. It is part of the global GS1 organisation, dedicated to the development and implementation of global data standards and solutions for the supply chain.  GS1 standards are the most widely used in the world.  GS1 UK helps industry to implement these data standards through the use of bar codes, RFID, Global Data Synchronisation (GDS) and electronic business messaging.

About GS1 UK NHS CfH initiative

The GS1 UK NHS CfH initiative was launched in March following the Department of Health’s announcement recommending the use of GS1 standards as part of the ‘Coding for Success’ policy.  The policy document issued guidance for the use of automatic identification and data capture technologies, such as bar codes, across the NHS.

For more information contact:

Lisa Henshaw or Kirsty Sewter
Fourth Day PR
+44 (0)20 7403 4411

Suraya Adnan-Ariffin
GS1 UK
+44 (0)20 70923575

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