Case Study: West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts achieves GS1 compliance and improved patient safety with Dakota Integrated Solutions

Dakota Ensures WYAAT NHS Hospital Trusts Are GS1 Compliant

The West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts, a collaboration of NHS hospitals including Airedale and Bradford, faced the mandatory challenge of becoming GS1 compliant to meet the UK Government's Scan4Safety initiative. Their Patient Administration System generated barcodes that were unreadable by machines, creating a significant patient safety and operational hurdle. They engaged vendor Dakota Integrated Solutions to develop a solution.

Dakota Integrated Solutions created custom middleware hosted within the trusts' existing printers. This solution transformed raw patient data into compliant 2D datamatrix barcodes for wristbands, automatically adapting to different sizes, and provided the hardware and media for location labels. The implementation successfully eradicated errors in patient identification and medication administration, ensured full traceability of equipment, and brought the trusts into full compliance, leading to significantly improved patient safety and operational efficiency.

West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts

Aubrey Sitch

Scan4Safety Programme Manager