Exciting developments with blood spot failsafe

In today’s blog post we’d like to tell you about the great progress we’ve made with the Newborn Blood Spot Failsafe Solution (NBSFS).

NBSFS is a web-based system that helps to detect all babies born in England that have missed or delayed newborn blood spot screening. It works by alerting maternity staff when a baby’s blood spot card hasn’t arrived in the screening laboratory on time.

Making an impact

All labs and maternity units in England and the Isle of Man (including the Portland hospital) are now using NBSFS, and there is even a link to a similar system in Wales. Specialist children’s hospitals such as Birmingham Children’s Hospital are also interested in using the system to make sure that newborn babies in their care haven’t missed screening.

NBSFS really works – users tell us it’s regularly picking up babies who may have otherwise missed screening. The benefits of this are huge. If these babies had a condition, missed screening might have meant serious illness and even death due to late diagnosis and treatment. A local user highlighted a great example:

There has been one record that I wanted to make you aware of which was for a baby born at [hospital]. They failed to notify [neighbouring community team] of the discharge home and therefore the first we knew about it was when the baby appeared on failsafe so this is an excellent example of where the system picked up not only a blood spot that had been missed but the postnatal care of mum and baby. It is all sorted now.