Richard McCann talks to Queen Alexandra Hospital’s Colin Walker and discovers what real-time wireless monitoring in a departmental setting means at first-hand.
Colin Walker manages the Department of Clinical Microbiology at Queen Alexandra Hospital, Portsmouth. The department occupies a section of the hospital’s state-of-the-art pathology centre and provides a comprehensive range of diagnostic and clinical microbiology services including bacteriology, mycology, parasitology, TB diagnostic service, diagnostic and screening serology, and a range of molecular techniques for diagnosis of bacterial and viral infections. In addition, the department provides clinical advice on diagnosis, interpretation of results, infection and outbreak control management and public health investigations, education and training on all aspects of microbiology.
Microbiology experience
“We’ve been using the IceSpy temperature monitoring system from British firm The IMC Group in clinical microbiology for more than 12 years,” explained Colin. “In September 2007 we had the opportunity to expand the system across pathology when all the disciplines relocated to new purpose-build pathology premises at the hospital. So the expansion of IceSpy out of microbiology into blood sciences and cellular pathology was based on the experiences of its value in microbiology during the previous five years.”
An experience-based decision took the department from manual record-keeping to an entirely automated monitored and recorded system. “Before we had automated wireless monitoring of temperature-related equipment, somebody would be tasked with going around and filling in the sheets for each piece of equipment to record the temperature,” said Colin. “As we have a large number of pieces of equipment, this lost us an hour out of each day.”
The wireless monitoring removed the need for busy staff to go around with a chart and manually record the equipment temperatures each day. There were other advantages, however: “We were manually recording temperatures only once a day, whereas wireless monitoring gave us the advantage of recording on an hourly basis. So we then had a ‘real time’ idea of how the equipment was performing, such that if there was a fault or the temperature fell outside the minimum and maximum parameters that we’d set, then the system would give us an alarm, warning that there was a problem.”
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