Rada Puts Patient Safety First at Birmingham Children's Hospital
Birmingham Children's Hospital is a leading UK specialist paediatric centre, offering expert care to 90,000 children from across the country every year. Providing quality treatment and care to patients on this scale requires the highest standards of infection control.
Hospital water systems can become a source of pathogens and bacteria and a probable source of nosocomial infections. The financial and resource demands this can place on a health service already under considerable pressure are significant.
In England alone, healthcare-associated infections (HCAIs) are estimated to cost the NHS £1 billion a year - with infected patients costing three times more to treat than uninfected patients. Yet, it is the more pressing human cost and the emotional strain on those infected and their families that are incalculable.
With an established history of working in the healthcare sector, Rada understands a hospital setting is a tough place for taps and showers - from ensuring stringent infection control regimes are met to guaranteeing user safety.
The estates team has a long standing relationship with Rada, having worked together for over fifteen years. The recent installation of Rada's Sense Washbasin and the Rada Thermotap widely across the hospital has cemented this relationship.
The Rada Sense Washbasin Kit T3 is a concealed digital mixing valve for washbasins, offering non-touch flow and temperature control and comes with a wall mounted spout. The Rada Thermotap is a basin mounted thermostatic mixing tap that has a single sequential lever control from cold through to a pre-settable maximum temperature.
As Matt Bancroft, estates team, Birmingham Children's Hospital explains:
'At the heart of everything we do is the safety of our patients, visitors and staff. As you'd expect, we have stringent infection control regimes in place and central to avoiding an outbreak is accurate temperature control. However, storing water at temperatures that can control bacteria does present a scalding risk to users and we have duty of care that requires hot water temperature to be controlled.
Specifying products that meet the twin demands of bacterial control and user safety is a tough job but one that Rada's products achieves. The thermostatic sensors in both products provide us with the confidence that water will always be at a safe pre-set temperature at the point of use. This is particularly important for us to guarantee the safety of our most vulnerable users.'
The thermostatic sensors in both products enable the estates team to precisely control temperatures, set a wide range of flow times as well as pre-programme a range of hygienic flushing options such as duty flushing.
As it is not possible to determine which taps and showers will require duty flushing, the default for many hospitals is to manually duty flush all taps and showers. This can introduce the possibility of inadvertent human error and can often mean many high-use outlets are flushed unnecessarily as there is no way to tell which outlets are used regularly and which are not.
While typically functions are undertaken by cleaning staff, that may not be the case in every healthcare setting, where care staff may also be called upon. The ability to pre-programme duty flushing results in resources not being directed away from other valuable forms of patient care, and represents a significant annual cost.
Rada's range of healthcare products have been designed to support healthcare professionals by helping reduce waterborne infections and help meet critical safety needs. As the estates team at Birmingham Children's Hospital has discovered, the result is a more hygienic, healthier and safe washroom fit for the modern healthcare environment.
Rada is driven to design water flow controls and washroom products that promote safety and sustainability and to solve problems in a way that makes a fundamental difference to people's lives.
It believes people should be safe and secure, using taps and showers designed to prevent injury and waterborne infection while conserving resources. It's at the heart of everything it does.
