The Darent Valley Hospital in U.K. has recently chosen Nedap’s security management platform to secure their drug cupboards. Access to the drug cupboards can be managed within the platform, via the standard integrated locker management functionality. This micro-level access control functionality is putting an end to key-management.
The Darent Valley Hospital in U.K. has recently chosen Nedap's security management platform to secure their drug cupboards. Access to the drug cupboards can be managed within the platform, via the standard integrated locker management functionality. This micro-level access control functionality is putting an end to key-management.
The hospital's Intensive Therapy Unit housed 16 cupboards with key based locks. Approximately 65 nurses hold keys for the drug cabinets. Due to the frequency of use, the locks were wearing out, causing disruption while locks were replaced, getting extra keys cut and issuing keys to people working across different shifts.
The key based locks in the existing cupboards were replaced with Nedap MIFARE electronic locks, integrated into the security management platform. The staff were provided with MIFARE smart cards instead of keys. This solved the problem of locks wearing out and brought key-management to an end.
In addition, locker management enables access to the drug cupboards to be managed from a web-based software application. As each person is registered within the system, the user-friendly software application enables a supervisor to quickly and easily check who has accessed the drug cupboards at any time. In this way, it became not only an extremely practical, but also a secure solution with full audit capabilities.
Currently the hospital uses the locker management functionality of the security management platform to secure their drug cupboards. In the future, the hospital could choose to easily expand the system with other platform features, such as access control, intrusion or video surveillance.