Ruth Graham

When i began my post at NHS Western Isles, and audited the cardiac arrest equipment provision across the Western Isles. The results, I found, were not dissimilar to other previous Resus roles I had undertaken, with current themes around regular checking, quality of checks and equipment discrepancies/expiries reoccurring. We needed to guarantee a high standard of crash trolley, but more importantly address potential procurement issues due to our rural location.

Based on this audit we needed to find a way of simplifying checking processes for staff, standardising equipment provision, increasing our governance over our emergency equipment to guarantee that trolleys could be maintained at a high standard ready to use albeit potentially infrequently.

The benefits to using this system have been numerous. I am able to see what trolleys have been checked, those that have missed checks, but most importantly those that are missing equipment or are holding expired equipment. The MKC system feeds into our procurement/stores and pharmacy departments who get notified automatically when equipment/drugs are ordered.

The interface of the system is so simple, easy to use and self-intuitive. This made rolling out the system easy from a training perspective. The noticeboard system ensures key messages can be communicated to staff, and the ability to embed user videos means that I can supplement our face to face training with a collection of “how to” videos.

The support and knowledge from the MKC team was phenomenal. The team were excellent at working with us to design our lists/systems/checking frequencies and always on hand to answer an queries and fully supported the system set up. In fact they are still always contactable  2 years on, and able to help us with system queries or troubleshooting, and are very proactive in keeping the system up to date, relevant and dynamic to our changing service needs.