Staff and patients at Airedale Hospital are finally feeling the benefits of going by tube.

The hospital's £180,000 pneumatic tube system, which was installed last year, is working well after initial teething problems.

German company Aerovac, which has its UK headquarters in Nottingham, began installing the computer-controlled system in April and completed the job in October.

A network consisting of miles of tubing links up 37 stations across the hospital, and provides a means of transporting small items at speed to different departments.

Cylindrical carriers 30cm long and 16 cm in diameter are propelled along the tubes by four motors, which either suck or blow them along.

They can carry medication from the pharmacy directly to the wards, transport pathology specimens as well as X-Ray requests, medical records labels and pathology reports.

Business manager for planning John Sollberger says: "While it is predominantly for pathology and pharmacy, any area of the system can send small items to another.

"The whole thing is computer-controlled, and one of the major problems has been the build up of static electricity at various points, but with new earthing that has been solved.

"There was also a problem with Wards' 20, 21 and 22, where carriers were getting stuck and falling to the bottom of the tube because of the vertical height, so they were effectively getting lost in the system."

The benefits of the system include the ability to handle urgent tests more quickly without the need for someone to travel physically between wards and departments.

It speeds up the turn around times for pathology specimens that can be sent to the laboratory as soon as they have been collected from the ward rounds. This, the hospital says, spreads the workload more evenly as specimens are not arriving in a large batch, allowing earlier analysis of the results and quicker clinical decisions.

The system is also of benefit to the pharmacy, which can dispatch medication to the wards much sooner, especially at peak times.

Patients waiting to go home will in turn have less time to wait as their discharge medicine is sent via the tube.

The system has additionally freed up medical, nursing and other clinical staff who previously had to transport specimens and drugs by foot.

In the first month of stable running alone there were 18,000 journeys, with carriers travelling at six metres a second taking on average two minutes from the sending station to the destination.

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