Instrument Tracking
 When a tray of instruments arrived in the decontamination Department it was discovered that a pair of Metzenbaum dissecting scissors had a broken blade and that the fragment was not in the tray. Was it in the patient, or had it just dropped harmlessly onto the floor and been swept up at the end of the operation without anyone noticing?  Each tray is individually coded and it took only a few moments to find out which patient needed to be investigated.  It was not in the operation site and reassurance was swift.  Without this tracking it would have been necessary to recall patients from all theatres in four hospitals for the previous two days – around 250 patients would have been worried needlessly. (and just imagine the adverse publicity).

 After her operation a neurosurgical patient was confirmed as having CJD and it was easy to locate and quarantine the instruments used in the operation.  Replacement costs were a tenth of those incurred a few years earlier in similar circumstances when it had not been possible to identify which of ten trays had been used.

National Joint Register
Galen was one of the first systems to upload data directly to the NJR.  This eliminated what had been a very laborious process by which Hospital administrative staff had to print pages from their own theatre system and then re-enter the data to the NJR Web site.
The automatic upload is best done in weekly batches of up to 100 patients at a time

Overseas visits
A team from the West Midlands visited India to work at a hospital dealing with musculoskeletal deformity, mostly as a result of poliomyelitis.  They were able to write up operation notes using Galen7 as easily as if they had been in the UK.

Multi-centre research and audit
Galen7 is ideally suited for projects involving several hospitals, especially those organised by Junior staff whose time at the hospital may be only a few months.  This is the way to work with colleagues in other hospitals and produce a study with many more patients.