A REPLICA RBH ward has been built in Winnersh Triangle to help train the next generation of medics.
Global medical technology and manufacturing company Becton Dickinson (BD) has a Safety & Innovation Hub at its UK base, used for training about the products it makes, including blood tubes and sample kits, syringes, catheters, and health diagnosis kits.
The hub aims to reflect a patient’s journey from their hospital admission, and includes a set up mimicking intensive care.
Simon Noble-Clarke, marketing leader at BD explained: “It’s about learning how to use the products more effectively.
“We bring in clinicians, doctors nurses pharmacists to understand their challenges, help them understand how to use the products better, working out where there are challenges in the system.
“The Royal Berkshire Hospital has a brilliant sepsis pathway, helping to diagnose, support and treat the patients who are at risk of and develop sepsis.
“One of the things we find is in diagnostics if you don’t get the blood sample just right, then it becomes difficult for the diagnostics team to properly diagnose the patient.
“We identify problems through discussion with medics then we dedicate training to staff to get samples right. It’s more about improving practice than it is necessarily developing or testing new products.
“The products are already online, we want to help the NHS get better outcomes and more efficiently churn patients through the system.”
BD helped the NHS during the lockdown phase of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic with a ‘flu plus’ syringe, which minimised the amount of waste from vials.
Mr Noble-Clarke said: “102 million of these syringes were sent to the NHS. We estimate there might have been one to two million extra vaccines able to be provided out of the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines available.
“We also supported patients at the point of care diagnostics, so making lateral flow tests and other products that support the patient at home such as urine management for incontinent patients.”
BD says it will continue to host Royal Berkshire Hospital staff to learn about products and come up with problem-solving solutions.
Mr Noble-Clarke said: “We have products here that are still manufactured in the country that are as old as the NHS, if not slightly older.
“The blood tubes started in 1949, it keeps developing and iterating. We have been around for a long- time helping UK healthcare.”
The company was founded in New York in 1897, and has sites across the world.
