Data management at Stepping Hill
Stockport NHS Foundation Trust is the first site in the UK to meet the new CPA standards for POCT. Following a two-day assessment, the trust has achieved CPA accreditation for blood gas, blood glucose, international normalised ratio (INR) and total haemoglobin testing at the point of care. The CPA assessment team was extremely impressed by the quality of the trust’s POCT service in terms of how POCT is delivered and supported by the trust.
Stepping Hill’s POCT coordinator, Samantha Ekin, puts cobas IT 1000 at the heart of POCT. She comments: “cobas IT 1000 has been vital in moving towards CPA accreditation for POCT. It provides access to important information regarding reagents, such as lot number, when first in use, expiry dates, activation dates for connected instruments, and all quality control data. It also has an operator database, which includes dates of certification/re-certification and a record of how often an operator has used an instrument, as well as recording all the patient results.
“The functionality of cobas IT 1000 can be configured to the requirements of individual facilities. Our system differentiates results generated at the point of care from laboratory results. Each result is linked to the operator who performed the test, the reagent lot number, the serial number of the analyser, the date and time, any alarms noted and/or comments from the operator. cobas IT 1000 gives us a complete audit trail of the analytical part of the POCT test.”
To ensure consistent and standardised training of POCT operators, Stepping Hill Hospital is in the process of implementing and rolling out cobas academy eLearning, the online training package from Roche.
“cobas academy is an online eLearning package,” Samantha explains. “This means that operators can log on to the system at a convenient time using their unique operator ID code. This gives us a full audit trail of who is accessing the training programme and what has been achieved. cobas academy is extremely useful for the recertification of operators. Used alongside the requirement to perform quality control testing, it ensures operators have the required competence and that they receive the necessary updates in their training.
“Although accreditation for POCT is not mandatory,” Sam concludes, “the new CPA POCT standards give POCT coordinators a structured framework to follow. This will help to ensure that POCT services are robust and quality assured – with quality indicators that are measurable and where clinical effectiveness is the driver for POCT.”
eLearning in York
As POCT increases in healthcare facilities, the training of users to ensure that they are competent is becoming an ever-growing challenge. This has been recognised in the CPA standards for POCT, which call for POC testing facilities to demonstrate adequate training and recertification of operators. York Hospital has adopted the cobas academy eLearning tool from Roche to help meet these requirements.
York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has 85 Accu-Chek Inform II blood glucose meters and six cobas b221 blood gas analysers installed across the trust. These instruments are linked to the cobas IT 1000 POC data management solution, allowing them to be monitored and managed centrally.
With around 1700 operators for glucose testing alone across the trust, POCT coordinator, Anne Penrice sees the advantages of using cobas academy eLearning to help deliver a high standard of training to POC users.“We have a huge number of staff that we need to train and retrain,” she comments. “This is an enormous task if it is all done face to face. It’s very difficult for staff to come off the wards. cobas academy eLearning provides a way to engage staff in training without them needing to leave the wards. They can access it whenever it is quiet and they have time to fit it in, so it is much more convenient for them.
“We originally started using cobas academy eLearning for the glucose meters in December 2010,” she continues. “The package is used by anyone who has received initial training, ranging from matrons to healthcare assistants, in order to maintain their competence. We still need some face-to-face training, but the majority of users are now able to be recertified through cobas academy eLearning. We are now rolling out the cobas academy eLearning for recertification of blood gas analyser operators.
“The Royal College of Nursing allows users to achieve CPD points for the cobas academy training. In addition, the package helps us to achieve CPA standards for POCT, which requires adequate training of staff and proof of competence. This Roche system provides a full audit trail for training and a record of the recertification status of staff.”
cobas academy eLearning offers a full online training programme, which includes video training clips and further information about testing. The system provides the POCT coordinator with a comprehensive overview of each operator’s competence profile. This enables trainers to identify strengths and target areas for further development. In 2010, cobas IT 1000 with cobas academy eLearning was awarded the Nursing Times Productive Working Silver Award.
“I like the fact that cobas academy includes the whole training process from start to finish,” continues Anne. “It delivers the information for training, an examination, which provides reassurance that the users have learned sufficiently, recertification, and then, through cobas IT 1000, we can control user access to equipment. Without cobas academy, all of this would need to be done manually. It saves time for me and I know that operators are receiving consistent training.”