'Hall Lock' Offers Innovative Healthcare Solution
A pioneering innovation from Cardiff University’s School of Medicine has lead to the development of a colour-coded interlocking system designed to prevent wrong route injections for patients. Such accidents are rare, but can be extremely serious but the patented Hall Lock system eliminates the possibility of wrong route administration via a serious of connectors which can only link with the correct fitting, rather than the common locking mechanism currently in use.
Professor Judith Hall is Head of Anaesthetics, Intensive care and Pain medicine at Cardiff University and worked closely with the South Wales based company Flexicare Medical Limited who specialise in the manufacture and supply of medical devices to the healthcare sector.
Prof Hall interacted closely with the Technology Transfer Team throughout conception, development and validation of the technology. Patent protection is being sought throughout Europe and the US. The success of this project was recently featured at a Medical Devices Event via Cardiff University Innovation Network and has was officially launched at the Biowales conference held over 1st and 2nd March 2011.
Professor Hall said:
"One reason for drug errors in medicine is that humans make mistakes and wrong route administration is a recurrent cause of drug errors. This can be avoided by the use of connectors that simply make it impossible for drugs meant for one injection route to be given via another route.”
"We needed to stop all these wrong-route injections so I invented a series of connectors that will not fit with any other connector. There’s one shape for intravenous injections and then another different shape for nasogastric tubes, for spinal injection and so on. They should cost less than pennies but they should save lives."