Safety equipment tracking in hospitals

With our GS1 approved safety equipment tracking solution, Lyngsoe X-Tracking™, you can enable your hospital to track safety equipment in real time, ensuring assets can be located at the point of need.

Why is safety equipment tracking in hospitals crucial?

Hospital environments and safety equipment go hand in hand. Healthcare professionals use many different types of safety equipment for various purposes, meaning it is in constant circulation. In healthcare, the term ‘safety equipment’ largely relates to the use of specialist patient moving and handling equipment, such as slings, hoists and evacuation sheets, and respiratory protective equipment (RPE), such as respirators.

Patient moving and handling equipment and RPE are critically important as they protect both patients and hospital staff. Patient handling equipment ensures patients that require assistance in mobility can be safely lifted and moved without causing injury to either the patient or carer(s). RPE creates a barrier between healthcare workers and infectious agents, which reduces the risk of contracting infections and transmitting them to other staff and patients. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, RPE is typically used to protect clinically vulnerable staff members, who are at high risk of getting seriously ill from COVID-19.

At Lyngsoe Systems, we deliver a GS1 approved safety equipment tracking solution, Lyngsoe X-Tracking™, that enables hospitals to track safety equipment in real time, ensuring assets can be located at the point of need. This is hugely important to allow hospital staff to easily locate and therefore properly maintain patient handling equipment and RPE, ensuring that the equipment is in safe working order to protect both patients and staff. Increased visibility of safety equipment not only improves patient and staff safety, but it also saves unnecessary time spent searching for items and improves operational efficiencies. In addition, the data collected and recorded by X-Tracking™ enables hospitals to make informed, strategic decisions in the procurement and management of hospital assets.

Patient moving and handling equipment tracking

Patient moving and handling equipment is designed to aid a healthcare worker in the transportation of a patient from one location to another. It includes slings, hoists, slide sheets, handling belts, emergency evacuation equipment and many more items. Using this specialist equipment protects patients and staff from any potential injury that could be caused by poor manual handling.

It’s important that safe working procedures are followed when using patient handling equipment and that hospital staff comply with the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998 (LOLER). LOLER declares that the right type and size of equipment is used for the task at hand. For example, using a sling that’s too big could result in the patient slipping through and harming themselves. It also outlines the regular and correct maintenance and inspection of moving and handling equipment – equipment that isn’t maintained as per its instructions could fail and cause injury. Safety equipment tracking technology, like X-Tracking™, provides full visibility of patient handling equipment, so clinicians can locate the right item for the task at hand and clinical engineering teams can efficiently manage planned preventative maintenance (PPM), ensuring the equipment is up-to-date and safe to use.

RPE Tracking

The tracking of RPE, such as non-powered and powered respirators with tight-fitting facepieces (masks), has become much more pertinent since the COVID-19 pandemic. Hospital and healthcare workers are of course one of the highest risk workforces as they are in close contact with infected patients. This means that clinically vulnerable staff members, who are at high risk of becoming seriously ill from COVID-19, need to wear RPE to protect themselves from contracting the virus. This is typically a respirator with a tight-fitting mask that must be customized to fit each individual’s face. Some hospitals have invested in hundreds of respirators and masks for their staff, so it’s critically important that they can be easily located for several reasons:

  • To ensure staff members are using them to protect their health and safety
  • To regularly replace the filter and check the fit to ensure they are in full working order
  • To understand how many they hold in their inventory to effectively manage stock levels and only purchase new equipment when a base stock level is reached, preventing unnecessary procurement and expenditure

Our digitalized safety equipment tracking solution, X-Tracking™, provides real-time data on the location of all registered equipment, enabling hospitals to manage the adequate and safe supply of RPE.

Optimize your hospital safety equipment tracking

Tracking your safety equipment using Lyngsoe X-Tracking, helps to improve patient and staff safety, as well as operational efficiencies. It enables hospitals to:

  • Manage patient moving and handling equipment and RPE use in real time and access the data at any time, from multiple devices
  • Use data to inform planning and take strategic decisions
  • Procure equipment when a base stock level has been reached, eliminating unnecessary spend
  • Save time, which can be refocused on high-value tasks and, most importantly, patient care
  • Protect your patients and workforce, including clinically vulnerable staff members who need to wear RPE

Lyngsoe X-Tracking™ for hospital safety equipment

Our solution X-Tracking, is a GS1 approved, web-based application that provides real-time tracking of hospital safety equipment using RFID technology. It can track unlimited assets at the same time, making it perfectly suited to a busy healthcare environment.

Each hospital asset is labelled with an RFID tag and barcode, which is read by ceiling-mounted RFID antennas installed at strategic choke points throughout the hospital. When each asset passes through a choke point, its location is automatically updated in X-Tracking™. The labels can also be read by mobile RFID Handheld Terminals and Mobile Data Capture Carts in areas that are not covered by a ceiling-mounted reader.

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