29th Jun 2020
We always love a challenge. The more awkward and in depth the better. Standard trolleys can get a little boring, so imagine the excitement when this one landed on our desks.
Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, control the NHS Services within HMP Berwyn, where their services have been shortlisted in the ‘Community or Primary Care Service Design – North/Midlands/East’ category at this year’s Health Service Journal Awards which recognises the best organisations, teams and people in the NHS. Situated within HM Prison Berwyn, a £250 million Category C adult male prison in Wrexham, Wales, and is the largest operational prison in the UK.
The embedded team from the NHS offer many services to the inmates, including psychological as well as medical support. One of the daily routine jobs has been to dispense pharmaceuticals around the 550 Hectare Site housing over 2100 inmates. Dispensing medicines to this amount of people over such a vast site in its self is a full time job. When you add the fact that some of these medicines are highly controlled drugs into the equation, and that some of the inmates show dependencies, this is a cocktail of risks that needed some serious attention. Furthermore, limited space on site and the fact that the trolley had to go though a huge variation of security systems, needing to travel over different floor levels as well as a restricted space goods lift, the trolley has been made to an especially small 950mm x 600mm making it one of the smallest electronic powered trolleys we've ever produced.
This Fully Secure Drug and Medicine Trolley was built for absolute security. The sides have been filled with 4.5 mm aluminium checker plate creating an incredibly secure outer case, with all fixing points using heavy duty rivets so that they can not be removed by improvised methods that can be found in prisons. The solid structure of the aluminium hides the contents on the trolley. Also, for even more security, in the event that the operator was attacked for the contents on the trolley, this trolley is fitted with an ear piercing "Panic Alarm" button. Slam the button or hit the alarm from an infra red key fob and the "Panic Alarm" continues until authorised staff arrive to assist in the emergency and are able to disable the alarm.
All entry points of the trolley were fitted with heavy duty padlocks, however this again could be upgraded to a range of other options that we hold in our arsenal, including key entry, code entry or swipe card entry to make the cart even more secure.
There are other applications where this type of security is warranted, pharmaceutics distribution in hospitals, deliveries of sensitive records such as hospital records or personnel tax records, data centres moving sensitive data in either hardware or paper copy, movements of cash, or even gold and other precious metals and stones.
We are currently exploring further avenues for security including automatic truck stops using RFI tagging. With this system, if someone were to try to move the cart and the content out side of authorised work areas the trolley would auto shut down, creating more obstructions and delays for thieves in the event of attempted theft.