Member News
By Lord Walton of Detchant - 25th February 2010
Lord Walton of Detchant writes for ePolitix.com ahead of his question on the display of metric units of National Health Service scales.
I have tabled a starred question in the House of Lords on 25 February 2010 asking whether all NHS bodies now comply with the requirement that all scales used for weighing patients should display metric units only.
The critical importance of this matter relates primarily to the fact that many doses of powerful drugs widely used in the NHS are calculated according to the body weight of the recipient in kilograms. If a dosage were determined in error, based upon a weight measured in imperial units, the outcome could be very serious, since underdosing might mean that the remedy would be ineffective, or, even more seriously, substantial overdosing might even have fatal consequences.
LACORS (Local Authority Coordinators of Regulatory Services) carried out a survey in 2008 and 2009 of weighing practice in NHS hospitals. The formal report published in August 2009 is available at http://ukma.org.uk/files/docs/21749.pdf.
In October 2008 LACORS recommended that 'all scales used for medical applications should only display metric units'.
Even earlier, in May 2008, the Department of Health issued an Estates and Facilities Safety Alert to NHS chief executives and board members dealing with this issue, and further advice from the department and the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) is awaited. It is a matter of great concern that LACORS reported, in its final 2009 report, that despite its earlier recommendations, about 30 per cent of scales in NHS hospitals were still switchable between imperial and metric units, and of these a 'staggering' one in ten were set to imperial at the time of the survey.
Dods Parliamentary Communications Ltd