4 L-R: John O’Hare-Price, lead critical care nurse technologist, Sara Santos and Sumeet Khubchandani, critical care nurse technologists Pumped to be world first Hundreds of new medicine pumps have been successfully installed in the RFH’s intensive care unit (ICU) as part of a ‘world first’ project. The 460 pumps deliver vital medicines and fluids to ICU patients and switching from the old models without a glitch was crucial to patient care. What made it more complex was a trust-wide software upgrade needed to be implemented so the new pumps would work – and the upgrade affected all medical devices that linked to the trust’s electronic patient record (EPR). Thanks to the meticulous planning and hard work of a group of staff, the change-over went smoothly. Lead critical care nurse technologist John O’HarePrice said that changing over the pumps which ‘talk’ directly to EPR had never previously been attempted by any ICU department. “It was an incredibly complex job and one that no other hospital has done before,” he said. “Because many of the medicines delivered by the pumps can’t be paused at all, there was a huge risk to patient care if the upgrade didn’t go smoothly and the pumps didn’t work immediately. We had nurses on standby to deliver medicines in case that happened.” Critical care nurse technologists, pharmacists, medical electronics and the digital team, as well as nursing and medical staff played a crucial part in the project. John added: “We did a massive amount of testing and preparation before the go live – testing out different scenarios and developing workarounds which meant that thankfully the change-over went to plan.” There was a huge risk to patient care if the upgrade didn’t go smoothly “ “ The new pumps have a number of benefits for patients including reducing the likelihood of errors occurring because the prescriptions are loaded directly on to EPR, which warns clinicians if the medicine dose falls outside normal parameters. The pumps are also connected to Wi-Fi, which means they continue collecting data even when a patient is being moved, thus reducing documentation errors. Because the software upgrade affected other trust sites, BH and CFH were also involved in the project. John added: “Pharmacy played a huge part in the project – going through our medicines library and checking everything was entered accurately. We’ve got a library of 274 drugs with a range of different prescriptions for each so that was a really big job for our pharmacists. “But I would like to say thank you to every single team who was involved – it was a multidisciplinary team effort!”
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