This week Media Studio completed a training video for operating theatre staff as part of a scheme to revolutionise the way that surgical equipment is delivered to theatres before every case.

In these times of austerity we often see hard compromises being made, but this time we're able to report a win-win result. With this new project CUH has reduced costs, saved staff time and improved patient safety.

The project was managed by Supply Chain Project Manager, Mike Coward, working together with Theatres' Victoria Penning and Edna Kouzel, to streamline the selection and delivery of surgical instruments and consumable items to theatres. 

The key to its success is that the content of the kit for each operation is under control of theatre staff, but does not require them to spend time locating items from a store. This is done by Procurement, where the kitting team pick all the items for a procedure from stock and place them into an individual tote. The tote is delivered to the theatre before the scheduled operation and  then returned to the store, together with the empty packaging and any unused items. The system uses bar codes and RFID tags to give precise recording of the equipment used and much greater ability to control stock levels.

Media Studio was asked to film the new workflow processes from beginning to end, to produce a training video explaining how, at every stage, the items needed for an operation are checked and delivered in time. The training video will be shown to all theatre staff in an eLearning package, so that every member of the team knows how the system works for both elective and emergency cases.