Conceived in 1852 as the UK’s first paediatric hospital, the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) opened its doors on Valentine’s Day with just ten beds. Presently, GOSH is the only exclusively-specialist paediatric hospital in the UK, treating over 150,000 patients each year for the rarest and most complex conditions. GOSH is a national centre of excellence in the provision of specialist children’s healthcare, delivering the widest range of specialist care of any children’s hospital in the UK, all at no cost to the patient. As an NHS Trust, cost saving and improved productivity are priorities for GOSH. The cardiac catheterisation laboratory at GOSH utilizes high-cost consumables on a daily basis, requiring greater focus on accountability and reducing costs. GOSH needed a way to computerize stock in order to reduce wastage of expired stock and to supply accurate costing for each procedure to commissioners that pay for GOSH services.
The move to InventoryControl
In accordance with the rules governing GOSH, the hospital sought a solution designed to improve efficiency and accuracy of stock control. The Great Ormond Street Hospital purchased Wasp MobileInventory (now sold as InventoryControl), as well as a Wasp handheld device for mobile scanning. Implementation was simple. After categorizing the catheterisation lab’s stock into logical, manageable sections, a consistent nomenclature for item descriptions was developed. The items were then entered into the Wasp database, and barcodes generated for each individual stock item. Rather than placing a barcode label on each stock item, the hospital elected to create a folder containing the barcodes of the stock items. Now, managing stock is efficient and intuitive. As cath lab stock arrives in the department, it is scanned into stock, and then removed upon use. The mobile device allows staff to scan cath lab inventory out of stock as it is used on the patient. Determining accurate cost per procedure is easy and compelling with the Wasp software. Using Crystal Reports, which seamlessly integrates with InventoryControl, GOSH customized a professional-looking report that includes a list of the items used and total cost for each procedure. The lab now has access to a variety of reports, including total cost of consumables used per month and per year, average cost of certain procedures, and total value of items in stock, with the click of a button. Complicated, inaccurate end-of-year stock audits are no longer an issue for GOSH. InventoryControl
offers audit functionality, allowing the hospital to compare physical inventory to the database and create discrepancy reports. A lab representative elaborates, “The Wasp system is flexible and provides a good value for our money. It is an efficient stock control solution in a clinical environment.”
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