£9.5m patient safety boost as new research centres established
Two expert research centres have been established to drive improvements in the safety, quality and effectiveness of NHS services.
The centres will be supported by £9.5m of Government funding over
five years. One, based at St Mary’s NHS Trust, London, and Hammersmith
Hospitals NHS Trust, London, will look at the safety, quality and reliability
of the technology used by the NHS and the role of staff and IT resources
in improving patient safety. The other, based at King’s College
Hospital NHS Trust, London, will investigate emerging health technologies
and look at ways in which services and staff can be organised to improve
patient safety.
Research grants worth up to £800,000 have also been awarded to
Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and University Hospitals
of Morecombe Bay NHS Trust to support research on patient safety.
Bryony Dean Franklin, director of the centre for medication safety and
service quality at Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust, is joint programme
lead for the research streams at the Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust
centre.
Professor Dean Franklin told The Journal that one of the first projects
the team will undertake is to evaluate a robot for cytotoxic compounding. “A
robot is currently being installed within the pharmacy department at
Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust,” she explained. “We plan
to carry out a formal evaluation of that initiative, rather than just
installing the robot and seeing how we get on.”
The group will also look at the computerised selection of drugs and at
systems to highlight test results to clinical pharmacists, she said. “A
PDA [personal digital assistant], or something similar, would be used
to highlight results or drug levels that are outside a pre-defined range.
That would enable clinical pharmacists to have the results immediately
wherever they are and be able to act on them.”
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