Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust has fitted active RFID tags to 1,309 medical devices, 846 of them hospital beds, across the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and the Princess Royal Hospital in Telford. The system, supplied by RFiD Discovery, regularly captures the location of 95% of all tagged equipment, and the Trust is extending its fixed reader network to 58 readers across the two sites.
Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, usually shortened to SaTH, is the main provider of acute hospital care for Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin and mid Wales, serving nearly half a million people from just over 700 beds according to the Trust’s own website, though the RFiD Discovery case study describes the two hospitals as 400-bed acute sites. The case study document carries a March 2021 version stamp and RFiD Discovery published the web version on 12 May 2023, so the figures below describe the deployment as it stood in the early 2020s rather than a current count.
The problem: beds that could not be found
Before the tags went on, tracking beds and medical devices at SaTH was, in the Trust’s own account, a real challenge. Acute bed shortages are a standing feature of NHS operations, so a bed that cannot be located for its service or repair is a bed that is effectively out of circulation. Getting beds back into use quickly depends on knowing where they are.
The second problem was loan equipment. Each of the two hospitals runs a manned medical equipment library, and staff there struggled to keep track of what had gone out and where it had ended up. Devices were turning up in cupboards, and technicians had to work back through what the case study frankly calls sketchy manual records to find them. Clinical staff were also losing time hunting for kit that another ward had borrowed.
That pattern is self-reinforcing. When staff cannot rely on equipment being available they start putting devices aside for later, which removes them from the pool and makes availability worse for everyone else.
Why active RFID rather than passive UHF
This is the part worth understanding if you are weighing up a similar rollout. SaTH uses active RFID, which means every tag carries its own battery and broadcasts its unique ID at regular intervals whether or not a reader is nearby. The tag does the talking. A reader within range simply hears it.
Passive UHF, the technology usually branded RAIN RFID, works the other way round. A passive tag has no power source of its own and stays silent until a reader’s radio field energises it, at which point it reflects a signal back. Passive tags are cheaper, thinner and effectively last forever, which makes them excellent for inventory counts, labelled asset registers and anything you are willing to walk up to and scan.
The trade-off is range and initiative. Passive tags typically read over a few metres and only when a reader is deliberately pointed at them, so covering a whole hospital with passive readers means putting readers wherever you want to know something. Active tags read over much longer distances and report continuously, which is what lets a sparse network of fixed readers cover large areas and pick up movement without anyone doing anything. For mobile assets that wander unpredictably across a hospital site, beds and infusion pumps and wheelchairs, that difference is decisive. It is why bed tracking projects tend to land on active RFID even though the tags cost more and eventually need their batteries dealt with.
How the deployment is laid out
SaTH’s system is a hybrid of fixed and mobile reading, which is a pragmatic and fairly common way to cover a hospital without wiring every corridor. The main ward blocks at both hospitals are covered by fixed RFID readers, which pick up tag broadcasts automatically. Everywhere else is covered by daily mobile scanning, using a total of four handheld readers, two per hospital, carried by clinical technicians as they audit the wards.
Both routes feed the same central database, which records where each asset was last seen by the system. Between the fixed readers and the four handhelds, the team regularly captures the locations of 95% of all tagged equipment. That number is the one to hold on to: it is a real operational figure from a real estate rather than a vendor’s laboratory read rate, and it comes from a deliberately partial reader network topped up by people walking round with scanners.
What changed
The headline benefit is the obvious one. “RFiD Discovery enables our technicians to locate beds and other mobile devices quickly and so they can focus on their core tasks of servicing and repair,” said Nigel Watkinson, Medical Engineering Manager at the Trust.
Michael Woffindale, Bed Technologist at SaTH, put the clinical side of it plainly: “The system enables us to have the right equipment available without delay, which is great for patient safety.”
Underneath those quotes are several second-order effects that are easy to miss when scoping this kind of project. Device utilisation improved, which re-established clinical confidence that equipment would be there when needed, and that broke the hoarding cycle described above. Damage to equipment fell noticeably as well, for a slightly uncomfortable but entirely rational reason: users know that medical engineering can see where a device has been.
Infection control gained a capability it simply did not have before. During an outbreak, the infection control team can look back at where a particular bed or device has been and pull it out of service before it spreads anything further. The same audit trail makes it much easier to find and replace a bed or device that has been reported as faulty, rather than leaving it in use until someone stumbles across it.
The system also flags up service dates, so scheduled maintenance on beds happens on schedule instead of being missed. In a maintenance regime that previously relied on finding the asset first, that is a meaningful safety control rather than an administrative nicety.
One detail from the case study is worth repeating for anyone planning a rollout: clinical staff had initial doubts, and came round afterwards. Location tracking in a workplace is not received neutrally, and the reported turnaround came from the system visibly saving clinicians time rather than from the business case.
What comes next at SaTH
On the strength of the results, the Trust is extending the fixed reader network to a total of 58 readers across the two hospitals. More fixed coverage means more equipment movement detected automatically and in real time, and correspondingly less reliance on technicians walking the wards with handhelds.
The Trust also plans to open RFID tracking up to other departments, specifically naming Estates, X-ray and IT, so those teams can tag their own equipment and see location data in the same central software. Shared infrastructure across departments is one of the few genuinely cheap wins in asset tracking, since the readers are already in the ceiling.
Separately, SaTH has been looking at GS1 compliance requirements and considering RFID-enabled asset labels for every medical device to allow quick and accurate auditing. GS1 standards are the global identification standards used across the NHS under the Scan4Safety programme and the Department of Health’s eProcurement strategy, which mandates GS1 identification for every product and every place in English acute trusts. In practice a GS1 asset label is a passive job, so a trust going down that road typically ends up running passive labels for identification and audit alongside active tags for live location, not choosing between them.
About the supplier
RFiD Discovery is the RFID tracking brand of Paragon ID, an identification technology group whose products span transport ticketing, payment, identification and traceability. RFiD Discovery says its systems are used in over 200 hospitals in the UK and beyond, with a track record now in its second decade, and it supplies both active and passive systems, which is why deployments like SaTH’s can mix the two. The company is a GS1 partner and a RAIN Alliance member, and Paragon ID is accredited to ISO 9001.
For more deployments of this kind, see our healthcare and case studies coverage, or the Implementing RFID guide for how to scope a project like this.
Read more at https://www.rfiddiscovery.com/en/inspiration/tracking-beds-at-shrewsbury-telford-nhs-trust
