In part 2 of our interview with Dr Richard Jones, we ask about hand written wristbands.
The quality of wristbands present is most hospitals are hand written and subject to damage either by water or by abrasion. And it means that many patients actually when you look at their wristbands you can’t read their name or their identity. The use of modern printing techniques means that you can have indelible ink and you can include features such as bar codes which can actually improve the quality of the wristbands. I’ve been a patient on a couple of occasions recently myself and my wristbands were completely unreadable and I felt my own potential safety was compromised because had I been unconscious they would have had no way of identifying me and I think that’s a common problem. It matters not just for diagnostic testing but also for drug delivery because identifying the right patient and getting the right treatment or the right test at the right time depends critically on that identity and often it’s the wristband that’s the only way of doing it.
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