The safety alerts that relate to equipment such as hoists that may be dangerous or are found to be at fault are released by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). Outcome 11 of The Essential Standards of Quality and Safety prompt all registered service providers to have clear procedures in place to act on alerts from an expert or professional body or a product manufacturer

It is discouraging that Commissioning organisations, who more often than not supply the equipment in the first place, are not obliged to implement the Essential Standards of Quality and Safety and have themselves struggled to pass on these important notices to affected parties or post bulletins onto their Occupational Therapy unit website page.

In 2010 The Safety Business Ltd instructed all its clients to ensure that Registered Managers were registered with the MHRA to receive these important bulletins.

It is important that any instruction given to Safety Business clients is workable and client feedback to date has advised that bulletins are issued almost daily and are often mixed up with medical devices that advise of kinks in breathing tubes used by medical professionals and medication advice that is irrelevant or simply would not apply to a care service provider.

For the busy manager it is not always possible to pick through the deluge of emails and identify the important ones and the danger of course is that an important notice that relates to a handling aid or hoist will be missed and a person in receipt of their services could be placed at serious and significant risk if the equipment was used.

On a much more serious note people using handing aids who fund their own care as part of the Direct Payment scheme are possibly completely unaware of these special notifications and may be at risk from using faulty and dangerous equipment through not fault of their own.

Bettina Ratcliffe Managing Director The Safety Business Ltd comments “There is absolutely no chance that my elderly mother would either register with MHRA or understand the deluge of notifications if received”

“ The most vulnerable people in society and their support network need readily accessible information that is clear, that makes sense of the dangers and gives clear direction, not medically related gobbledygoop that could be written in Latin.”

“We would urge all Occupational Therapy departments to post MRHA handling aid related notices and bulletins onto their website page and allow service providers to create a direct link to these from their website so we all chime together. In the meantime we are going to take the lead and post them onto our website within the Free Documents Manual Handling section. www.safetybusiness.co.uk/free-documents ”