‘Bloodhound’ makes patients safer

The electronic system, which will cost the taxpayer £50,000, will replace the old paper-based systems at Hull Royal Infirmary and Castle Hill Hospital.

Managing director of MSoft eSolutions, Matt McAlister, said: “One hospital I recently spoke to had 15 ‘near misses’ a year, some have fatal situations, thankfully they are very rare where the patients is given the wrong unit of blood.

“Hospitals use systems like ours to mitigate that problem. If they use our Bloodhound system the way we train them to use it there won’t be any incidents.

!We are giving them the most-up-to-date information at the patient’s bedside at the point they are putting the physical cannula in the arm.”

Mr McAlister said the system would allow staff to save a huge amount of time - as they would no longer continually have to ring the lab to ask if blood was ready, and fridges containing the blood could be moved closer to the wards. It should also prevent blood that has “gone off” being used, because of the precision with which it notes the time and where it has been.