Goldplate

Case Study

Guernsey's Princess Elizabeth Hospital

Guernseys Princess Elizabeth Hospital uses Goldplate to process monitoring plate colony counts, laboratory investigations and corrective measures for their aseptic operations.

A case experience in using Goldplate.

"For years we had used a simple spreadsheet which grew unwieldy and inflexible and over time became a serious impediment to our operations. We moved on to a bespoke in house system which made changes for the better – but it also suffered from inflexibility as our needs changed and so it too was retired.

Following the implementation of Goldplate we now have a workflow that has completely met our needs and saved huge amounts of staff time and costs. Waste is down, missing information a thing of the past – the work process is tightly controlled and staff are happy with the whole process. Our recent audit was made much simpler, less stressful and we were pleased with the auditor’s comment: ‘it is a brilliant system!’

The benefits came in many forms: Very fast data entry, reduced paperwork, no photocopying into folders or hunting down lab reports, and not having to marrying these up with the prevention and correction actions. We now easily control the work in progress, monitor trends, and we can always see what’s going on by using the monthly overview. Also the system puts the right work in front of the relevant team. Essentially Goldplate has put us back in charge of the process – it’s no longer the other way around!

As well as the costs saved in time, we also saw a reduction in materials and other benefits. We had been sending many plates for analysis unnecessarily because at the time of CFU counting some staff were unsure of the limits or hesitant about counts below alert level. The system visually identifies these at the time of entry (without the need for looking up) but also allows the operator to instigate precautionary investigations where for example a fungal colony is seen even if the count is below the alert level.

The quality of data has been vastly improved and we are able to record to species level if desired. The laboratory has a much easier method of entering their results (they had previously sent paper or email reports) directly into the system and they can see their workload at a glance. No more transcription errors or lost reports! Additionally their senior staff are able to examine the bench results and enter comments or advice on the information.

The prevention and correction team’s work has been vastly streamlined too. They now see exactly where and what issues they have to deal with and can take the necessary actions and record them directly to Goldplate. They too have a work list which is dynamically grown or shrunk as each scenario is dealt with.

Managing the overall operation has been made incredibly simple and accessible. Over-counts are visible in a time stream – along with the status of the lab and prevention team’s work. Each item can be expanded to a full printable report showing the organisms involved, laboratory recommendations, a graphical trend of that particular plate’s history, and the prevention correction team’s actions and comments. Presenting data at the auditor’s visit was a simple matter of using the built in intelligent reporting system – which actually updates itself dynamically as changes to the department or plate structure changes! For example we had a situation where the clean room floor became unstable (probably due to water accumulating under the vinyl barrier) so we had to instigate extensive extra monitoring. This required the creation of another 10 SDX and 10 TSA plates. We did that in less than 20 minutes, the system reconfigured itself and we were good to begin monitoring – with full reporting automatically updated!

Goldplate is a very capable system, but it is incredibly easy to set up and start using. Adding new staff is a simple as inviting them to join via email – one chooses the appropriate worker type, add their email – that’s it. On receiving the email the new worker signs up via a very secure login system and they are up and running. There is a whole lot more to describe, but this case study might become too lengthy. Goldplate run a fully functional trial period at no cost for three months so the best advice is to try it out; they also povide very short online training videos (about three minutes) to get you up and running – or you can arrange an online demonstration. You can always download any data you save – so the effort won’t be lost, but I doubt you’ll want to leave after using this system!"

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