Website tracks spare care beds

The service allows staff to locate the nearest spare ICU bed

A website designed to curb the number of deaths among patients being transferred around UK hospitals in the search of an intensive care bed has been launched.

The service allows medical staff to find out where the nearest spare bed in an intensive care unit (ICU) is located so that critically ill patients can be transferred quickly.

Anything that minimises the risk or difficulty associated with patient transfers is to be welcomed

Dr John Heyworth

In the last 30 years demand for intensive care beds has risen as ICU treatment has changed from being considered a luxury to a necessity.

Consequently many hospitals can be full at any one time, resulting in the need for critically ill patients to be transferred to hospitals with spare beds.

Lack of communication between hospitals and insufficient methods to locate spare beds make the transfer process difficult.

In addition, the available information on spare beds can be outdated, inaccurate or simply hard to find.

These problems can result in critically ill patients being transferred large distances at great risk to their health.

Tragedy

This resulted in tragic circumstances for a road traffic accident victim in the UK who died while on a journey of over 200 miles.

There may well have been beds available at nearby hospitals but staff had no means of knowing where they were.

Writing in the journal Critical Care, Philip Hopkins and Anthony Wolff explain how the new service can help.

Visitors to the site, called ICUnet (http://www.icubeds.info) need to use a password to update the information. Each hospital is asked to submit the bed state of their ICU to the website, which is constantly updated.

Other hospital units can then view a comprehensive, up-to-date list of nearby bed space.

"This system, if successfully implemented, could prevent many critically ill patients dying during transfers," say the service creators.

Dr John Heyworth, president of the British Association for Accident and Emergency Medicine, told BBC News Online: "The system is fundamentally flawed in that throughout the country it is a frequent occurrence for ICU beds to be full.

"However, if you accept that is the situation then anything that minimises the risk or difficulty associated with patient transfers is to be welcomed."