Staff at East Kent University NHS Foundation Trust will use Apple iPods at the bedside to match patients with blood products using its new Bloodhound system.

MSoft eSolutions’ system controls access to and from all blood fridges and a bedside management system allows each bar-coded blood unit to be matched with the patient’s bar-coded wristband.

It is being implemented across East Kent’s five hospital sites, to help ensure that only approved staff are allowed to access blood and that the right blood gets into the right patient.

Staff at the trust will be amongst the first to start using the technology at the bedside on iPods.

Angela Green, East Kent’s blood transfusion coordinator, said: “when we first started discussing the project we made it clear that we needed the application to work on the iPod as the trust had already invested heavily in technology for our early warning system used to highlight the deteriorating patient.

“MSoft rose to the challenge and the finished application looks even better than we ever anticipated,” she added.

The trust will also be rolling out MSoft’s Sample360 blood samples labelling system, desigend to reduce the number of rejected samples.

MSoft has recently won contracts at a number of other trusts including Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells, Brighton and Sussex, Royal Cornwall, Nottingham University and Salisbury.