Patient Safety Enhanced with Reliable Point of Care Blood Gas Service

NHS Grampian has recently standardised point of care (POC) blood gas analysis throughout its hospitals, with the installation of 13 new Roche cobas b 221 blood gas analysers. These robust analysers require minimal maintenance and perform reliably and consistently in a variety of POC settings. By providing a full audit trail of results, they allow NHS Grampian to meet important clinical governance standards, while ensuring patient safety and high quality patient care.

“We required a blood gas service that would not only provide rapid and accurate blood gas results, but that would also perform reliably in busy wards for 24 hours a day, while requiring minimal maintenance and intervention from a laboratory perspective,” explained Dr Elaine Davidson, Clinical Scientist responsible for Clinical Biochemistry POC testing in NHS Grampian

“Mandatory patient identification has helped to improve patient safety,“ Dr Davidson continued. “Results can be recalled on the cobas b 221 analysers quickly and easily, if required, and correctly identified with stored patient demographics. We are now working towards integration of results into the electronic patient record. This will further enhance patient safety by eliminating the need to tape or transcribe results into patient notes.”

“The cobas bge link software has been vital to this installation,” she added. “The status of each analyser can be viewed, and basic maintenance performed, from a central location. This allows the laboratory team to provide remote support 24 hours a day. Operator identification, authorisation and certification is also controlled using the cobas bge link software, which provides a full audit trail of results and allows us to address many aspects of clinical governance.”

The cobas b 221 blood gas analysers are located in the laboratory, emergency department, intensive therapy unit (ITU), respiratory ward, high dependency units, acute medical assessment units, labour wards and neonatal units throughout NHS Grampian. Consequently, the analysers must be sufficiently versatile to meet vastly different requirements.