A team from Rambam Health Care Campus developed a prize-winning program that saves 4,000 manpower hours annually.
Rambam Health Care Campus recently won an award for logistics in health systems from the Director General of Israel’s Ministry of Health. The second-place award was issued by the National Council for Logistics in Health Systems for 2019 and presented to the Rambam team for implementing an application that helps nursing and medical staff maintain the availability and high quality of equipment for resuscitation.
Ministry of Health procedures require medical staff to ensure that resuscitation equipment is available and up to date at any given time. The equipment, which includes resuscitation carts, defibrillators (pads), and portable resuscitation cases for transport with patients, numbers more than 3,000 items on each resuscitation cart. Having all the equipment available, in working order, and up to date is essential in order to increase the chances of successful resuscitations.
Procedures that demand repeated inspections of equipment on a daily basis require many expensive manpower hours in each department. In the COVID-19 era, where the necessity and high availability of staff at the patient's bedside is a valuable resource, excessive time spent on equipment inspections is not the best use of very essential working hours.
To improve this process, Rambam formed a team that included Mirit Barzilai, from Rambam’s Nursing Division; Dudu Levy, Operations Manager for the Operating Rooms in the Division of Surgery, and Ilana Siman Tov-Dodeles, the hospital’s Resuscitation Coordinator.
How Does it Work?
All contents of the cart and equipment are entered into a database. The information includes the item name, its batch number, the expiration date, and the dosage and quantity required by the procedure. The new process enables any staff member with the proper authorization to use a simple barcode scan to check all items on the cart and their validity. This allows for improved patient safety and accurate and fast management, saving financial resources and staff working time, and most importantly – ensuring the suitability of the cart when needed. After implementing the new practice, more than 4,000 annual manpower hours were saved, costly items near their expiration dates were marked and used first, and the sense of safety and confidence among the staff increased.
Ilana Siman Tov-Dodeles notes, "As someone who is responsible for ensuring performance of resuscitation in the best way, I place great importance on the need to focus the team on the resuscitation process itself, without having to deal with the cart inventory during the precious time needed to save lives."