6681 PaNDR express times

Objectives Sick neonates in local neonatal units and special care baby units depend on the expertise of regional neonatal transport teams and efficient systems to ensure their safe and timely transfer to a specialised centre. Efficient and timely dispatch of neonatal transport teams to these local units is crucial to guarantee the safe and prompt transport of newborns in need of specialised attention. The Paediatric and Neonatal Decision Support and Retrieval Service (PaNDR) is the neonatal transport service for the East of England. The National Transport Group (NTG) benchmark for time-critical unplanned emergency team dispatch is 60 minutes. This study presents an investigation into the dispatch time of PaNDR neonatal team. Methods This is a retrospective audit investigating the dispatch times of PaNDR neonatal team to unplanned emergency transfers during specific months in year 2022; January, April, and October. The timing measurements were derived from two distinct starting points: The time of referral for an unplanned emergency transfer to Emergency Bed Service (EBS) or the time of transition from a decision support case to an emergency transfer. Instances of unplanned emergency transfers that occurred when the neonatal team was not at their base location were excluded from the study. Results During the three-month period, the PaNDR neonatal team carried out a total of 97 unplanned emergency transfers, out of which 64 occurred while the team was at their base location. The study revealed that one-third (33%) of these transfers were accomplished within 30 minutes and 83% were within 1 hour. The median dispatch time was 45.5 minutes. Table 1 illustrates the dispatch durations for all of these transfers. The exclusion of the months of March and September was deliberate, as these are months when new doctors undergo rotations within the department, potentially impacting the dispatch process. Conclusion This study highlights a large variation in dispatch times when the neonatal team was stationed at base. It is imperative to address this by scrutinising the dispatch processes when a referral is initiated with the aim to standardise and improve dispatch times. Numerous strategies have been proposed to address this issue, including logging onto computers at the start of the shift and prepacking equipment rucksack. We intend to re-evaluate the impact of these changes through a re-audit in the upcoming year.