How to Manage Soon to Expire Items and Avoid Missing Equipment and Medication in Hospitals

Keeping track of equipment expiry dates can be hard in fast-paced environments like hospitals. This is made even more difficult when many of the items used every day have dates that need to be checked. However, making sure everything is in date is a crucial component to delivering good care.

In an emergency when every piece of equipment must be ready to use there is no time to double-check dates and nor should you have to. Here is where MyKitCheck can help. Two of its main features are the expiring equipment alerts and missing equipment alerts.

Expiring Equipment Alerts

Pieces of equipment stored in kits across a hospital could be used sporadically in some departments yet used every day in others. The expiring equipment alerts on MyKitCheck allows you to set the notice you need to be alerted for each item. So whether some of your supplies need one week’s notice of expiration and others need four weeks the system can send alerts in the most effective way for your team. This enables users to prioritise the use of individual pieces of kit or give plenty of time to rotate it with a department that is more likely to use it in the timeframe. If the item is still in circulation by its expiry date MyKitCheck will automatically change its status to missing as what is available is no longer suitable for use.

Missing Equipment Alerts 

What could be worse than trying to deal with an emergency only to find the piece of equipment you need isn’t there? With missing equipment alerts key staff members can be assigned to be notified via email when a check has been made and an item has been identified as missing. This alert is also displayed when logged into the platform to ensure maximum visibility, so a corrective action is taken quickly. This avoids the risk and anxiety of not having the correct equipment readily available.

In the case of a shortage of a specific medicine or if anything has been discontinued staff can be warned of this using the digital noticeboard feature within the platform. The noticeboard has been created to communicate any important information and updates. This has been of great benefit to cross-site hospital Southport and Ormskirk NHS Trust. Carol White – Resuscitation Officer at the Trust says “if there is a problem getting an item for the trolleys or if a drug needs to be substituted, we can let everyone know and tell them what to replace it with” all within the platform which allows them to update the whole hospital instantly and avoids any communication issues.

Make out of date and missing equipment an issue of the past and increase patient safety with the bonus of avoiding wasting any resources with MyKitCheck.

Arrange your demo of MyKitCheck here.