Is your hospital ready for the NPSA alert?

No dates present

We asked our main site sponsor’s Brenmoor how hospitals were moving towards summer 2009 when the wristband regulations come into force.

8 out of 10 hospitals that are currently printing wristbands in England and Wales use Brenmoor and here are their experiences from the 90 or so hospitals that have already chosen to work with them in the last few years.

Says Paul Brennan from Brenmoor..

“Most NHS hospitals in England and Wales are now moving forward at a pace to ensure that they are ready to comply with the NPSA wristband safety alert which comes into force on 18th July this year.

There are many things to consider when choosing a bracelet. Most hospitals are working backwards from the wrist, ensuring patient comfort, ease of use for staff, whilst asking questions such as, does the bracelet fully comply with the NPSA alert, is it resistant to alcohol door entry gels, soaps and water?

To help with the decision, we are often invited into to meetings to talk through our range of wristbands. We always recommend a trial of the wristbands and one is often arranged so that ours and other manufacturer’s wristbands can be assessed and compared on their own merit. Once the trials are complete a final decision can be made on the choice of wristband from the data fed back on the wristband evaluation form (available on this site as a pdf download).

Teams are then despatched around the hospital to choose which work stations will be printing the wristbands, the space available in each position, power points and computer links are then all considered (and probably heavily debated).

When the wristband range has been chosen, the printer is the next thing to consider, this is a relatively quick decision, the printer should work with the wristbands to be produced, it should be small and compact, easy to use and a huge bonus if it is a printer commonly used in other parts of the hospital as the IT department will already be familiar with the programming language. The additional benefit of this is that spares can be quickly pulled from other areas if there is a breakdown.

All of the above can be completed in 8-10 weeks and so if you have not already started the process, then there is no need to panic just yet, but, time is slowly running out!”