All Wales COVID-19 CIVAS Service

NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership

During the COVID-19 pandemic, critical care facilities across Wales were under extreme pressure. The demands of this high influx of critically ill patients placed a huge burden on nursing staff and pharmacy departments to maintain supply of critical live saving medicines. The result was that nursing colleagues were spending time preparing medicines, reducing the time available to dedicate to patient care and increasing medicines risk due to the pressured environment. Regulatory medicines restrictions prevented pharmacy departments from being able to provide adequate support.

The decision was taken by NHS Wales to engage with commercial suppliers to design and build a temporary clean room facility that adhered to the strict regulatory requirements. This medicines unit was to be staffed by newly trained medicines manufacturing operators using semi-automated technology to maximise efficiency.

The production process, using new automated technologies, was the primary focus of the testing within the project. Manufacture of aseptic medicines is a highly regulated and strictly controlled process and requires extensive testing to assure the process is repeatable and reproducible, and poses no risk to patient safety. Alongside this process, there was a requirement to train and extensively test the skills and techniques of the operators who performed critical decontamination and medicines manufacturing processes.

Since receiving an MHRA Licence to manufacture medicines in January 2021 the CIVAS@IP5 Medicines unit has prepared and supplied over 26,000 ready-to-administer medicines to critical care units within Wales. This has estimated to have saved 260 days of nursing time, time now available for direct patient care.

As the critical care demand returns to pre-pandemic levels, the unit is using its capacity to develop new products that have a patient safety or service level impact.

Gareth Tyrrell

gareth.tyrrell@wales.nhs.uk