Archive for February, 2012
Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals Uses RTLS to Manage Assets, People, Hygiene
The organization has implemented a single system that manages patient flow, staff movements, assets and hand hygiene, via CenTrak hardware and Awarepoint software.
Feb. 28, 2012—The Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals National Health Service (NHS) Trust, located in England, is employing real-time location system (RTLS) software provided by Awarepoint to manage three different functions throughout its facility: tracking the movements of patients and staff members, managing the locations of tagged assets, and ensuring hand-hygiene compliance. Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals is utilizing CenTrak’s RTLS hardware, consisting of “Gen2IR” RFID-infrared (IR) battery-powered tags, monitors (devices that transmit an infrared pulse pattern containing a unique location code), “Virtual Wall monitors” (a type of monitor with a more tightly defined IR transmission zone, thereby providing greater location granularity) and RFID access points. The system also includes software from Awarepoint’s RTLS platform, known as the aware360°Suite, to store and manage data culled from the tag reads. Based on the proven functionality of this installation, the company reports, the aware360°Suite platform was commercially released at last week’s HIMSS12 conference.
Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals, an 800-bed facility, has completed the first phase of its RTLS deployment, consisting of using the CenTrak tags to track 550 patients simultaneously within 21 wards, with plans to add several additional wards and 250 more patient beds later this year. The hospital declined to comment for this story.
Britain’s NHS oversees hospitals throughout the country—a total of 168 different trusts, each representing a particular region of the United Kingdom. The agency has been seeking RTLS technology to improve patient flow and track assets and hand-washing compliance, and wanted a single platform that could accomplish all three objectives. NHS approached Awarepoint—which offers software for each of those applications—and requested a single solution on which all data could be managed and integrated with the hospital’s existing software, using RTLS tags and readers, as well as CenTrak display screens. NHS selected Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals as the first hospital trust in which to install the solution. The facility—which is more than a century old and includes 38 buildings on one campus—serves approximately 880,000 patients annually.
For phase one of the installation, the hospital trust wanted a system that could track patients as they are registered, moved through various wards and then discharged. By tracking where patients have been, the facility could then better direct staff members as to which services each patient requires next—for example, if he or she has been to radiology, the software could then inform workers where that patient needs to be moved to next. The system needed to track employees as well, says Tony Marsico, Awarepoint’s executive VP of global business development, so that managers could know which patients a nurse or clinician had visited, as well as where and for how long, thereby providing greater visibility into which services the patients were receiving.
The system also includes the ability to track hand hygiene, with CenTrak Gen2IR monitors and Virtual Wall monitors installed near hand-washing stations. When a staff member approaches a station and presses the dispenser, that action is linked to the individual’s unique ID number, and is then stored in the software. If the worker approaches a new patient after seeing another one, without first washing his or her hands, the system will record that incident, and management can later use that information to provide further training to those staff members who need it.
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Veolia chief wins board backing
Antoine Frérot has won a stay of execution at the helm of Veolia after the board of the French water and waste group said it had “renewed its confidence in the chief executive”, bringing a temporary halt to a coup attempt led by his predecessor.
In another victory for the beleaguered chief of the world’s biggest water utility by sales, the board “reaffirmed the significance” of his strategic plan to sell €5bn of assets and leave half of the 77 countries where it operates.
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The putsch against Mr Frérot was orchestrated by Henri Proglio, who led Veolia until 2009 but is now chief executive of EDF, the state-owned French nuclear group. Mr Proglio, one of France’s most powerful businessmen, still has a Veolia board seat and has been infuriated by Mr Frérot’s decision to tear up his legacy.
The attempt to oust the Veolia chief caused a political storm in France after it emerged that Jean-Louis Borloo, a former government minister with no experience of running a business, was one of the candidates being lined up to take the helm of a company with 300,000 employees, which provides services to 173m people globally.
Veolia should report losses for 2011 of at least €200m on Thursday, and large writedowns on its transport business. It has several poorly performing international businesses and €14.7bn net debt.
People close to the company said that Mr Frérot was still under threat.
Veolia shares rose 3 per cent to €9.29 after the board announcement.
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Baltic converter installs ETI Cohesio for linerless label production
Gipako, a label converter based in the Baltic area of Europe, has installed the region’s first Cohesio machine from ETI Converting Equipment for linerless label production.
The ETI Cohesio is a multifunctional off-line or in-line printing machine along with silicone and adhesive coating for the pressure sensitive industry.
According to ETI, Gipako’s management was impressed by the ‘economic advantages and huge possibilities’ offered by the Cohesio system.
‘Many companies in the world are using this recognized technology to improve their business performances,’ said the company in a statement. ‘This very efficient process reduces printing production waste, as only the facestock runs to the printing operation, before joining the liner to complete the PSA labelstock.’
Gipako is also a member of the International Label Group (ILG), a collective of ETI users around the world.
Click here for more stories about ETI Converting Equipment on L&L.com.
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Toronto General Hospital Uses RTLS to Reduce Infection Transmission
The facility is testing a real-time location system to track hand-washing, the cleaning of equipment and the visits to patients by staff.
Feb. 28, 2012—University Health Network (UHN), which operates three hospitals in Toronto, is testing a real-time location system (RTLS) intended to prevent the transmission and spread of new infections, as well as control any existing infections, by tracking equipment, patients and employees. The solution is currently being tested within three units of UHN’s Toronto General Hospital>, with plans to permanently deploy it if the technology provides data leading to a reduction of infections. Unlike some RTLS solutions that track individual staff members and their movements around a facility and at hand-washing stations, however, this system—provided by Infonaut, utilizing Sonitor tags and receivers—is intended to track behaviors that could lead to infections, while simultaneously protecting workers’ privacy, by not revealing the identity of individuals who are wearing the Sonitor badges.
The solution has been installed on two of the hospital’s floors, in the transplant, transplant step-down and intensive care units (approximately 25 percent of the facility’s ICU patients originate in the transplant unit). Equipment—including pumps, wheelchairs and mattresses—are tagged with Sonitor tags, while workers volunteering to participate wear ID badges, and patients who have completed transplant surgery, or who have been admitted into the ICU, wear Sonitor wristbands. Infonaut’s Hospital Watch Live software platform, installed on a server at the hospital, tracks the movements of people and equipment based on tag reads, says Niall Wallace, Infonaut’s CEO, with an accuracy of less than 12 inches. The software then provides reports indicating if and when those individuals and assets have been in contact with each other, as well as if and when a hygiene procedure has been missed, such as the cleaning of a piece of equipment, or the washing of hands prior to a patient visit. That information is then provided to the hospital unit’s management—without naming individual staff members, but rather reporting the overall behavior of a group (such as nurses) within that unit.
The solution was developed by Infonaut in collaboration with George Brown College, Wallace says, and has been tested by the college’s faculty and students at several locations during the past two years, including in the school’s simulated hospital environment. The system follows the model of the Positive Deviance Initiative, a program intended to encourage the creation of solutions to complex problems (in this case, how to increase the rate of hygiene compliance, such as hand-washing, and how to reduce the rate of infection without violating staff privacy). The Toronto-area health-care community is especially concerned about the hazards of hospital-borne infections, Wallace says, following a severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic that left one percent of the city’s hospital staff quarantined. Better data regarding who had been exposed to the virus could have reduced the need for quarantines, the technology providers speculate, and identified more specifically who was at risk.
Toronto General Hospital chose to test the system initially within its organ-transplant units and ICU, says Dr. Michael Gardam, University Health Network’s director of infection prevention and control. The project was awarded $180,000 in funding from the College and Community Innovation Program (supported by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) and the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation. By using the system, Gardam hopes that he can gain visibility into how well hygiene compliance is being met, both in terms of staff hand-washing and the cleaning of equipment, and to be able to contact individuals in the event that they may possibly have been exposed to infection. By tagging certain assets and biomedical devices, the system enables infection-control practitioners to identify which of these devices may be part of the chain of infection, according to Dick Tabbutt, Sonitor’s chairman.
The deployment consists of 600 wireless battery-powered tag readers (receivers) and 16 gateways, all mounted on walls. The gateways forward data to the server, and also act as tag readers. Four hundred of these receivers are installed at the hospital’s GOJO sanitizer dispensers, while the remaining receivers are installed at patients’ beds, as well as in hallways and select equipment rooms.
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Biomass power plant shuts down after fire
A fire at RWE npower’s biomass plant at Tilbury in Essex has damaged storage units holding thousands of tonnes of wood pellets just weeks after the facility – Europe’s largest such plant – began commercial production.
The fire, which broke out on Monday morning, was under control by late afternoon. But RWE confirmed that two out of three of the storage units – which together can hold up to 6,000 tonnes of biomass – which feed pellets into the furnace had been “definitely affected”.
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Generation has been halted at the 750MW plant, which will provide power for about 1.5m households when it is fully up and running.
“Firefighting operations were challenging because of the location of the fire high up in the main structure of the building, making it difficult for fire crews to reach it,” the company said. .
The plant is on the site of the utility’s ageing Tilbury coal-fired power plant, which is due to shut down by the end of 2015.
The coalition, which has promised to be the “greenest” government ever, last autumn unveiled plans to increase subsidies for co-firing biomass and coal in power plants. Yorkshire’s Drax plant, western Europe’s largest coal-fired power station, last week announced it would shelve plans to build dedicated biomass plants in favour of investing in co-firing at its existing site.
The company said it was too early to tell what caused the fire but an investigation is under way. No one was hurt in the blaze.
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