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Unique identification tag (UIT): a newer innovation for improving quality and safety in high volume cataract surgery set-ups

Session Details

Session Title: Practice Styles

Session Date/Time: Monday 07/10/2013 | 14:30-16:10

Paper Time: 15:00

Venue: Emerald (First Floor)

First Author: : B.Dey INDIA

Co Author(s): :    R. Venkatesh   K. Veena           

Abstract Details

Purpose:

To study the effectiveness of a Unique Identification Tag (UIT) attached to the wrists of patients undergoing cataract surgery in a high volume set tertiary care eye hospital.

Setting:

Aravind Eye Hospital, a tertiary care eye hospital of South India

Methods:

In a tertiary care eye hospital in South India where an average of 30000 patients is being operated for cataract surgery every year, we devised a Unique Identification Tag (UIT) to simplify the workload. It’s a simple paper tag attached to the wrist which contains MR number, name, dependent’s name, address, eye to be operated and IOL power. We use two types of coloured tags. Green tag is used for those who are apparently normal, red tag for those who need special attention like monocular, patients with grave systemic diseases, complicated cataract, etc. Usually the green-tagged patients operated by juniors or senior surgeons but the red-tagged patients go to senior surgeons only. The patients are divided beforehand by the paramedical staffs before being operated and cross checked by an ophthalmologist before being put into red-tag or green-tag catagory.

Results:

In the year 2011, 31839 patients were operated for cataract in our hospital. We have a doctor-patients’ ratio of 1:636 and paramedical staff- patients’ ratio of 1:80 during the fore-mentioned year. Despite the high volume of surgery, we had complication rate of only 1.39%. In spite of having many same name and same type of cataract patients, no wrong patient were operated not wrong IOL was put in the eye.

Conclusions:

In a developing country like India, where cataract backlog burden is huge but skilled man power is very less, maintaining safety and quality especially in centres with high volume surgery is always a challenge. This Unique Identification Tag (UIT) is a simple innovative way to regulate, simplify and maintain quality and safety of patients in high staff and patients’ ratio set-ups. It can lead to future innovations in this direction.

Financial Interest:

NONE