Maintaining a Safe Environment

Good care starts with preparation, before a patient even arrives. It is too late to realise an essential piece of equipment is missing in an emergency! We know that problems have occurred due to a lack of provision of basic and emergency equipment at the bedside. This can be helped by providing a checklist of essential bedside items and ensuring that systems are in place to order that kit to the ward, to check ward stock levels and to get essential equipment to the bedside, all of the time.

There are various strategies to help this to happen, such as incident reporting, excellence reporting, or simple quality improvement initiatives, using Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles or run-charts to show progress towards a goal of 100% compliance with a checklist.

Recommended paediatric bedside equipment:

  • Spare tracheostomy tube (same size) plus tapes
  • Half-size smaller tracheostomy tube plus tapes
  • Round-ended scissors
  • Spare tapes
  • KY Jelly
  • Syringe and saline
  • Suction catheter

Basic (face masks, airway adjuncts, supraglottic airway devices) and advanced equipment (laryngoscopes and endotracheal tubes) to manage the upper airway must be available on a resuscitation trolley for hospitalised patients.

Recommended adult bedside equipment:

Daily Checks: