SPONSORED
Patient safety and enteral
syringes Advisory Board
Funded by
Patient safety and
enteral syringes
Advisory Board
Tiene Bauters
Clinical Pharmacist
(Paediatrics), Ghent
University Hospital,
Ghent, Belgium
Sara Arenas-Lopez
Consultant Pharmacist
in Paediatric Critical
Care, Evelina Children’s
Hospital, London, UK
Andrew Robert Wignell
Clinical Pharmacist
(Paediatrics), Nottingham
University Hospitals NHS
Trust, UK
Dolores Elorza
Fernandez
Consultant Paediatrician
and Neonatologist,
Hospital Universitario
La Paz, Madrid, Spain
Andreas Trotter
Chief doctor of the
Clinic for Children and
Adolescents, Hegau-
Bodensee-Klinikum
Singen, Germany
Ehrenfried Schindler
Paediatric
Anaesthesiologist
(Medical Director),
Asklepios Kinderklinik
Sankt Augustin, Germany
Joanna Correa West
Medicines Management
Nurse, Birmingham
Children’s Hospital
Foundation Trust, UK
Chiara Tosin
Paediatric Intensive Care
Nurse/University Lecturer,
Azienda Ospedaliera
Universitaria Integrata
di Verona/University of
Verona, Italy
Amabile Bonaldi
Head Nurse, Neonatal &
Paediatric Intensive Care
Unit, Azienda Ospedaliera
Universitaria Integrata di
Verona, Italy
Hilde Holmsen
Paediatric Nurse,
Vestfold Hospital Trust,
Tonsberg, Norway
Patient safety is always the top priority for
healthcare providers, and even small errors
can have significant effects on patients. Growing
awareness of potentially grave risks associated with
misconnections between enteral and other tubing
routes prompted the International Organization
for Standardization (ISO) to create enteral
device specifications to prevent these errors.
A distinguished panel from leading EU institutions
comprised of ten experts across the acute care
spectrum, including physicians, nurses, and
pharmacists, convened in February, 2018 to assess
patient safety under the proposed ISO-80369-3
standard for enteral systems.
The panel was poignantly aware of cases
where death or morbidity resulted when medical
tubing was wrongly connected across physically
incompatible systems.
They reported on common causes of
misconnections, such as stressful working
conditions, work-arounds that disable safety
features, and lack of access to appropriate devices.
While the incidence of death from enteral
misconnections is not frequent, even one death
is a tragedy everyone wants to prevent.
32 | Issue 91 | 2019 | hospitalpharmacyeurope.com