Application of Barcoding to Reduce Error of Patient Identification and to Increase Patient's Information Confidentiality of Test Tube Labelling in a Psychiatric Teaching Hospital.
Learning from the experience of another medical center in Taiwan, Kaohsiung Municipal Kai-Suan Psychiatric Hospital has changed the nursing informatics system step by step in the past year and a half . We considered ethics in the original idea of implementing barcodes on the test tube labels to process the identification of the psychiatric patients. The main aims of this project are to maintain the confidential information and to transport the sample effectively. The primary nurses had been using different work sheets for this project to ensure the acceptance of the new barcode system. In the past two years the errors in the blood testing process were as high as 11,000 in 14,000 events per year, resulting in wastage of resources. The actions taken by the nurses and the new barcode system implementation can improve the clinical nursing care quality, safety of the patients, and efficiency, while decreasing the cost due to the human error.
National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, Taiwan.
Hsiu-Chu
HC
Liu
Department of Nursing, Kaohsiung Municipal Kai-Suan Psychiatric Hospital, Taiwan.
Hsing
H
Li
Department of Nursing, Kaohsiung Municipal Kai-Suan Psychiatric Hospital, Taiwan.
Hsin-Fei
HF
Chang
Department of Nursing, Kaohsiung Municipal Kai-Suan Psychiatric Hospital, Taiwan.
Mei-Rou
MR
Lu
Informatics office of Planning Department, Kaohsiung Municipal Kai-Suan Psychiatric Hospital, Taiwan.
Feng-Chuan
FC
Chen
D001800:Blood Specimen Collection / Q000379:methods; D003219:Confidentiality; D001330:Electronic Data Processing; D006778:Hospitals, Psychiatric; D006784:Hospitals, Teaching; D006801:Humans; D019300:Medical Errors / Q000517:prevention & control*; D010355:Patient Identification Systems / Q000379:methods*; D013624:Taiwan