Tag surgery patients with barcode to prevent medical blunders, experts say

Scanners make it easier to locate faulty devices such as breast implants or tools left inside patients

Every hospital patient should be given a barcode and scanned before surgery to prevent medical blunders, experts say.

The initiative aims to prevent a repeat of scandals where patients who were given faulty devices such as breast implants or replacement hips were hard to trace. It would also make it easier to identify whether a surgeon left a tool inside a patient.

GS1 UK, a not-for-profit organisation responsible for barcode standards, is today calling for the mass roll out of the technology across the NHS - meaning that the “person, product and place” are all tagged ahead of surgery.

So far, an NHS mandate - published in June - has instructed trusts to use barcodes to track all high risk medical devices such as pacemakers by next March.

But safety experts are urging the NHS to go further and use barcode technology to improve safety and speed at every stage of the patient’s journey.

It follows warnings that surgeons operate on the wrong part of the body three times a week, and leave a foreign object in a patient’s body twice a week.

Around half of trusts use barcode scanning to some extent, but only a handful have rolled it out to fully cover patients throughout their time in hospital, including in the operating theatre.

Research has shown the system can reduce safety errors by up to three-quarters.

Sir Terence Stephenson, president of GS1 UK, said scanning patients did not mean treating them “like a tin of beans” - but rather “giving them a unique patient identifier” which ensured vital information about them was properly used.

Trusts piloting the system found the process of admitting or discharging patients could be reduced from two and half hours to thirty minutes.

Sir Terence said: “We found that the use of barcode scanners can reduce that from two and a half hours to 30 minutes: I was really struck by that. Getting people out quickly is good for patients, but it’s also very good for the NHS, particularly when there are winter pressures.”

These time savings alone could free up around 4,000 nurses a year, he added.

Sir Terence, who is also professor of child health at UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, said he became interested in the potential of barcodes when he was asked to lead an investigation to trace women with faulty breast implants, and found that the information was lacking.

“This isn’t about people being a tin of beans, it’s actually about giving them a unique patient identifier; this actually emphasises their uniqueness.”

“If you have a Toyota car, and the brakes go wrong, they know exactly which cars they need.”

GSI UK estimates that just a handful of trusts have deployed the full model.

However, in some trusts the use of chips has been piloted which means that the location and details of equipment can be automatically updated without having to be scanned.

Prof Stephenson said such systems, in place in Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, saved staff hours which were usually wasted tracking down vital equipment.

Senior managers at the trust say the use of the ​​technology - which bar codes all rooms, staff badges, patient wristbands and drugs, and uses a system of radio-frequency identification (RFID) to trace medical equipment devices, means that audits of the ward to check supplies take two minutes instead of half a day.

An NHSE spokesman said: “Barcode scanning will be used in all surgical procedures where high-risk medical devices are used by March 2024 which will help detect, predict and prevent patient harm as well as improve outcomes for patients.”