Media Information
SEPTEMBER 2010

BABYWATCH™ ’Changing the Face of Maternity’

BABYWATCH™ VISION

Our vision is to safeguard the world’s newborns by setting the industry standard for best practice, safety and quality management in hospitals.

Babywatch™ will become recognised as the leading provider of Infant Identification Management Systems globally, and will narrow the gap between existing and optimal levels of safety and quality for newborn babies worldwide.

Babywatch™ provides a superior time-saving, infant identification, tracking and monitoring system, enabling maternity units to offer outstanding safety whilst working with newborn babies.

WHAT IS BABYWATCH™?

Babywatch™ is the one and only infant identification management system that provides hospitals and families with absolute peace of mind with regard to newborn identification through a fail-safe tracking system.

Patented and developed in partnership with CMO Global (market leaders in compliance and quality management software systems), Babywatch™ provides an integrated solution for hospitals seeking to improve on procedures and quality management for patient safety whilst addressing the very real risk of wrongly identified babies. Further Babywatch™ is now a software partner with Motorola.

Babywatch™ is a wristband barcode system which works in conjunction with mobile handheld PDA scanners which together track, verify, monitor and log all actions and procedures involving newborns during their stay in hospital: from BIRTH to DISCHARGE or TRANSFER to another hospital.

Such hospital actions include:

• when the baby is removed from its mother,
• when the baby has been administered drugs or supplements,
• when the baby has been administered a mother’s expressed breast milk,
• when the baby has been weighed and measured,
• when the baby has had its paediatric check,
• when the baby has undergone immunizations,
• when the baby has undergone blood tests,
• when the baby has had its post-meconium check.

Not only does the system log that this action has occurred, consequently charting the information, but Babywatch™ also eliminates all possibility of human error in the baby identification process when completing such actions on the baby. Through a unique dual checking system, Babywatch™ acts as a ‘second pair of eyes’, ensuring that the correct baby is with the right mother, or the right baby is drinking the right expressed breast milk for example, thus totally eradicating errors.

In this way, Babywatch™ provides an innovative system that enables hospitals to monitor, evaluate and improve on its current procedures, systems and quality management whilst also addressing the real risk of wrongly identified babies, and providing exceptional and unique benefits for parents, staff and hospitals.

Babywatch™ tracks the treatment of infants, reducing the workload of nurses and midwives enabling focus on care and creating confidence in the patient.

Babywatch™ is designed to work in a user-friendly step-by-step systematic manner and operates by scanning the infant barcode and mother barcode, ensuring the right baby is receiving the right care.

Babywatch™ features include:

• Action and issue tracing, including operator identification and time-dating of actions.
• Single user checking.
• Real-time documentation and comprehensive records – management of information, data collection and verification.
• Synchronization of information between hospital departments and sites when transfer is required.
• Ease of integration with existing procedures.
• Increased compliance and immediate notification of potential errors.
• Elimination of human error.
• Ongoing technical support.

Babywatch™ tracks the treatment of infants, reducing the workload of nurses and midwives enabling focus on care and creating confidence in the patient.

WHY BABYWATCH™?

Because the protection of the newborn is paramount.

In the past 20 years, despite advances in technology and quality management in hospitals across the world, the sad truth is our newborn babies are no better protected from preventable identification errors. An identification error is every parent’s worst nightmare. Not only is this an emotional issue for parents and staff but it poses an immense risk for hospitals.

Because in a non-verbal patient population, positive infant identification is paramount.

In settings where care is provided to non-verbal patients, such as maternity departments, special care nurseries and neonatal intensive care wards, identification errors are a significant problem. Identifying and monitoring actions performed on infants have often relied on labour intensive manual checks and are typically prone to human error.

• Babywatch™ will dramatically increase the efficiency and performance of maternity hospitals.
• Babywatch™ will reduce, if not eliminate, the number of identification errors and resultant negligence claim.
• Babywatch™ will introduce a 24-hour safeguard of newborns in maternity hospitals and will free-up maternity staff checking times allowing maternity units to provide a higher quality of care.
• Babywatch™ is fulfilling a long overdue need for a more thorough identification checking system within hospitals.

Expectant mothers will seek out hospitals with infant identification systems such as Babywatch™.

• An infant identification management system is a necessary part of newborn care. It simply eliminates risk and parents will look to protect their child in this manner.
• The technology is here and with Babywatch™ it is possible to safeguard our babies.

Because Babywatch™. Sets The Standard For Best Practice In Infant Identification And Management.

In a system where current manual techniques with baby identification are fraught with the potential for errors, Babywatch™ is the answer. Historically the methodology for infant identification has relied on patient wristbands which are not standardized in format, do not provide a log and do not provide the fail-safe dual checking system that Babywatch™ does.

Without Babywatch™, the following common scenarios occur in maternity hospitals on a weekly basis:

• Errors in matching baby to mother
• Errors in providing the correct expressed breast milk to baby
• Errors in misinterpretation of handwriting and legibility issues on newborn wristbands
• Errors in reading wristbands at night in poorly lit environments
• Difficulty in obtaining information from mothers when asleep or unavailable
• Reliance on the memory of staff members with regards to the removal of infants

Further, in an emergency situation Babywatch™ proves reliable and easy to use, at a critical time when mobility of real-time documentation is paramount.

ABOUT NATASHA OGLESBY

Babywatch™ is a wristband barcode system that identifies, tracks and monitors all actions and procedures involving the newborn from Birth to Discharge or transfer to another hospital developed from Natasha Oglesby’s greatest passion.

Working as a Midwife to Natasha, is more than a career choice. Natasha believes that being present at the birth of a baby is one of, if not the, most privileged experiences in life. The role of a midwife is to advocate for, and when necessary, protect both mother and child. This role does not finish when the baby is safely welcomed into the world. The midwife ensures the safety of both mother and baby from birth through to discharge from hospital, and Babywatch™ was developed from this concept. Babywatch™ was therefore developed by a midwife for midwives, and could not have been developed to such an exceptionally high standard if not for the many years of midwifery experience of its founder.

Natasha has worked both in the UK and Australia since 2000, and in her career has birthed over 1000 newborn babies. After an early career working as a maternity nurse, she became extremely passionate about birthing and the safety of newborn babies. Following emigration to Australia in 2002 Natasha completed her Masters of Midwifery in 2004. Since then, Natasha has continued to pursue her passion for birthing and maternity care, whilst researching and developing an innovative solution to a problem that exists globally.

As well as being passionate about midwifery and the safety of infants, Natasha is a mother of 5 daughters and truly identifies what it is like to be a parent of a newborn, and the impact of potential identification errors on families.

Natasha has been able to spend many years researching and developing this innovative solution to eliminate the risk of newborn identification errors.

The question is – can a hospital afford to NOT implement Babywatch™?