Jay-Nik

In their careers as Australian Paramedics, Clare Brown and George Poulos saw first-hand a serious short-coming in administering intravenous medications: once medicine from an ampoule is drawn into a syringe, a number of risks consistently occur. These include: Labelling - the syringe is often labelled by hand or a broken ampoule taped to a syringe, usually in high-pressure situations. It was difficult to capture all relevant information in a legible and safe way. Traceability and medicine mix-ups - once the medicine is separated from the ampoule, it is also separated from key information, including the type of medication and batch number. This makes it difficult to track and creates a high risk of medicines being mixed up. Medication diversion - a real risk of theft or abuse exists in hospital and pre-hospital settings. The current system makes it easy for people to take excess or wasted medicines, or administer substitute medications.