at Children's Hospital, Vilnius University hospital (VUL) in the Santara clinic branch, safety measures defined by the recommendations of the World Health Organization - patient identification bracelets - have been used. According to the Director of the Informatics and Development Center of VUL Santaras Clinics, Romualdos Kizlaitis, the first step of the project was taken at the Children's Hospital, as the safety of children is considered a hospital priority.
In children's hospitals, patients are often without parents or other legal representatives, they treat newborns, babies who cannot yet speak, so it is extremely important to accurately identify the patient before performing any action related to treatment or care.
Accurate patient identification in the healthcare system is much more important than it may appear at first glance. This avoids errors when prescribing drugs, performing tests, procedures, surgical interventions or operations, blood transfusions, giving newborns to mothers in maternity hospitals.
According to the deputy director of the Children's Hospital, pediatrician dr. Sigita Burokienė's Children's Hospital always paid great attention to the safety of the child in order to avoid medical errors: before performing a procedure, surgical intervention, operation, as well as blood transfusion, nurses and doctors had to check the medical documentation and make sure that the procedure was performed on the patient for whom it was intended. designated.
"Fortunately, we did not have any serious cases, but the possibility of errors always remains, and if such a medical error is made, the consequences would be unpleasant or even dangerous," says Dr. S. Burokienė.
It is very useful for the medical staff when the identification can be done quickly, without wasting sometimes very precious time. It is no coincidence that the Children's Hospital was the first to produce the identification bracelets that every patient who comes to the Surgical Corps these days receives.
"Although identification bracelets have been used all over the world for a long time, this innovation has only recently been introduced in our country," says Romualdas Kizlaitis, director of the Informatics and Development Center of Vilnius University Hospital Santaras Clinics. - Thinking about the future, we would think that even better wristbands should be introduced, which could be used to call for help via wireless communication and from which we could see the movement of the patient in the institution. Today's project solves the identification problem for the time being and provides the necessary information about the patient."
On the identification bracelet there is a bar code, the patient's name, surname, personal code, weight, medical history number. It is possible to record specific information, for example, if the patient is allergic to a certain substance.
It is expected that later the existing information will be able to be supplemented with other data necessary for doctors, for example, to which category of emergency the patient belongs in the Admission-emergency department, it will also be possible to find the phone number of the patient's location (department), parents' mobile phones or other necessary data .
