Developing a digital safe sedation logbook and audit tool (SEDlog) for healthcare professionals

Sedation consists of the administration of medication to relieve anxiety, reduce pain and provide amnesia, so that patients can tolerate unpleasant diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. It is used as a safer alternative to general anaesthetic for appropriate procedures, and there is an increasing trend toward the use of sedation for medical and surgical procedures.

Administration of sedation can be performed by appropriately trained non anaesthetist doctors and nurses, relieving an important bottleneck in the NHS and addressing the overwhelming shortage of anaesthetists.

Healthcare professionals have a regulatory requirement to keep a logbook of their sedation cases and to perform regular audits of practice. Currently, professionals keep a paper logbook which provides only limited evidence of competency and data for audits. For this reason, hospitals/clinics don't run regular audits, making it more difficult to identify areas of practice that need improvement. Sedation also has the potential to cause life-threatening complications.

The proposed project comprises the development of a mobile app - SEDlog - that allows professionals to keep a cloud based digital record of their sedation techniques which can be easily downloaded as proof of ongoing competency. It enables providers to conduct unit based audit and analytics. The app also provides national anonymised data insights on sedation practice in the UK (drugs administered, monitoring equipment used, complications per medical specialty and region).