Powering clinical traceability: a round up of day 1 at the 2022 GS1 UK Healthcare Conference

Even the country’s notoriously fickle weather seemed to want to welcome the first in-person GS1 UK Healthcare Conference in three years. London put on a beautiful spring display to greet visitors to the QEII Centre in Westminster, who gathered in the shadow of some of the capital's key landmarks for a bigger event than ever before –?over 30 speakers were on the agenda for day one alone.

As GS1 UK chief executive Anne Godfrey said in her welcome address, the times that have passed since delegates and speakers last met face to face are what tend to be defined as interesting ones.

That is particularly true for anyone working in healthcare and interested in traceability in a clinical setting. And, as Anne pointed out, this is not only because of the pandemic. It is also because of significant reports published since the last conference: not least “First do no harm”, the result of an investigation into medicines and medical device safety led by Baroness Julia Cumberlege.

The investigation reviewed the English NHS response to patients’ reports of harm from drugs and medical devices, focusing on the examples of hormone pregnancy tests, sodium valproate, and pelvic mesh. Speaking to delegates, Baroness Cumberlege said she had been “astonished and deeply worried” about the lack of data the system had collected on women and children harmed by these interventions.

Paper records, she reported, “were incomplete, dispersed, archived or destroyed”. That means it is not possible to know which precisely women and children have been affected by these treatments, nor to what extent.

Yet she said solutions to lack of data did exist –?including Scan4Safety, through which a group of trusts have introduced the scanning of standard barcodes across the patient journey. Baroness Cumberlege described visiting one of these sites as “a revelation”. "It brought home the power of data and its immense potential," she said.

Indeed, Kelsey Flott –?deputy director of patient safety at NHS England’s transformation directorate –?highlighted that barcode scanning has been highlighted as a means of increasing the safe use of prostheses and avoiding repeats of reported mistakes. She told delegates of the electronic point of care traceability (ePoCT)?project that has now been launched, building on Scan4Safety and seeking to expand the approach to more organisations.

Two speakers from the GS1 Global office, meanwhile –?Ulrike Kreysa and Géraldine Lissalde-Bonnet –?highlighted the potential of such scanning to improve care worldwide.

Three long years on from when it was last possible to meet in person – after a crisis of unprecedented scale and challenges with sourcing product during it, after a global rollout of vaccines, after a major national review highlighting the potential consequences of lack of clinical traceability – there was a sense the opportunity to really embed this approach was there to be seized.

“There’s never been a better time for NHS procurement professionals to put forward the case for Scan4Safety,” said Central Manchester University Hospitals' head of procurement and e-commerce Simon Walsh, to applause from fellow delegates.

“Get this on the agenda, get the investment case, reach for the stars, now is the time for it to be done.”

To read more about the presentations on day one of the 2022 GS1 UK Healthcare Conference, and to keep up to date with day two, follow the hashtag #bettercarecostsless