Security expert, Abloy UK, recently caught up with staff at Scunthorpe General Hospital, three years on from the trial installation of high-security PROTEC2 CLIQ cylinders and keys to upgrade the security of the drug cabinets.
The hospital had previously used a traditional mechanical lock system to secure its drug cabinets, with the ward manager in possession of a different key for each cupboard. This meant too much of nurses’ time was spent searching for who had the keys, and trying to find out which key fitted which lock.
The trust needed to find a way of being able to make this process more streamlined and easier for nurses to access keys, while also saving time and costs. The answer: Abloy’s PROTEC2 CLIQ system.
High-security cylinders and keys were initially fitted to drug cabinets and cupboards on one ward at Scunthorpe Hospital, as well as padlocks on fridges. Every nurse on the ward - including bank staff - had their own key, which was individually programmed to allow them specific access to the cupboards they needed to use.
The PROTEC2 CLIQ technology provided the hospital with added benefits such as easily being able to amend or delete access rights and collect audit trails from the Abloy PROTEC2 CLIQ cylinders, coupled with the ability to easily delete lost or stolen keys from the system, thereby ensuring that security is maintained.
Nurses spent significantly less time looking for keys and only needed one key for all cabinets, instead of a bunch. In addition to this, temporary staff could be granted access only for the time they were on duty.
Following the initial trial three years ago, the trust rolled out the PROTEC2 CLIQ system across an additional 20 wards per year. There are currently around 60 wards using the system, with plans to roll out to all remaining wards in the next two years.
Mike Urwin, clinical director of pharmacy and medicine management at Scunthorpe Hospital, said: “Throughout the trial of PROTEC2 CLIQ we undertook research to discover how much time was actually spent on nurses looking for keys, and the results were astonishing.
“Typically, a nurse would spend an average of 40 minutes per shift looking for keys. This equated to 250 minutes lost on a ward every day. Over a year, if this equation was used across our wards, the lost time would be the equivalent of having an extra 24 nurses on duty every day across the whole trust.
“The return on investment is incredible. We estimated costs of about £3,500 per ward to install the system, and that money is saved in released nursing time in about two months. So that equates to a return on investment of 600% in the first 12 months.”