For Patient Safety, Quality & Governance leads

The challenge

Perioperative medication incidents are rarely about careless people. They come from inconsistent processes, labelling risks and variable controls — and weak records make it hard to learn from them.

Variation is the risk

Checking, labelling and documentation practices that vary theatre-to-theatre create avoidable risk that policy alone cannot close.

Weak traceability limits learning

Fragmented, illegible or incomplete records limit incident investigation, accountability and quality improvement.

Improvement must be demonstrable

Governance committees increasingly expect medication-safety investment to show measurable, sustained improvement — not anecdote.

What changes with SAFERsleep

SAFERsleep replaces variable manual practice with one standardised, barcode-enabled medication workflow — and documents it automatically.

A standardised safety process in every theatre. Barcode-enabled checking with visual and spoken confirmation embeds the same control on every administration, every list.
Traceability by default. Every drug administration is captured in a structured, time-related electronic record as it happens.
Audit-ready records. Legible, complete and consistently structured records support handover, audit, incident review and governance reporting.
Data for quality improvement. Consistent electronic capture gives you the visibility into perioperative medication practice that paper never could.

SAFERsleep OR medical alerts and drug allergies screen

The evidence

SAFERsleep is one of the few anaesthesia medication-safety systems whose results have been measured and published in peer-reviewed clinical studies.

35%

relative reduction in parenteral drug errors in a large incident-monitoring study — from 0.049 to 0.032 errors per administration.

21%

lower overall error rate in a randomised clinical evaluation — mean errors fell from 11.6 to 9.1 per 100 administrations.

2m18s

to retrieve specified information from a SAFERsleep record, versus 3m 41s from conventional records.

A large incident-monitoring study and a randomised clinical evaluation, both published and peer-reviewed.

Your questions, answered

Q.Is the safety case robust enough for governance?

The evidence base is unusual for this category: a large incident-monitoring study showing a 35% relative reduction in parenteral drug errors and a randomised clinical evaluation showing a 21% lower overall error rate — published, peer-reviewed and citable in your papers.

Q.Will this create better control, or just more software?

SAFERsleep is a workflow redesign with technology in support, not a screen bolted onto old practice. The safety behaviours — scan before you administer, keep the voice prompt active — are built into how the system is used.

Q.Can we evidence improvement clearly for audit?

Yes. Structured electronic records make retrieval measurably faster (2m 18s vs 3m 41s in published comparison) and give you consistent data to track compliance and improvement over time.

Q.Will the benefit be sustained after go-live?

Published results show the benefit follows compliance — which is why implementation includes training, procedure templates and ongoing review, so safety behaviours become routine practice rather than a launch-week habit.

Built to support your governance agenda

Standardisation

One consistent medication workflow across theatres, teams and sites — the foundation of any safety programme.

Oversight

Clear, structured records strengthen incident review, morbidity meetings and quality-improvement cycles.

Compliance

SAFERsleep is compliant with health regulatory and patient data security standards.

No competitor came close to matching the reliability, ease of use and built-in drug administration safety features that SAFERsleep offered. We would have no hesitation in recommending this system to other hospitals seeking electronic solutions for anaesthetic record keeping and drug administration safety.

Dr Roger HallClinical Director — Theatres, Critical Care & Anaesthesia, Papworth Hospital

Information for other roles

Every member of the evaluation team sees SAFERsleep differently. Share the page that answers their questions. See all roles →

Anaesthetists

Safer medication practice and clearer records — without adding friction in theatre.

IT & Informatics

A supportable, interoperable solution that fits hospital systems and real constraints.

Procurement & Finance

A defendable business case balancing safety, cost, supplier confidence and risk.

Executive & Board

A strategic, scalable safety and governance improvement for the whole perioperative pathway.

Medication-safety improvement you can measure — and defend.