NHS Scotland Scan for Safety

Overview

NHS Scotland is delivering one of the most ambitious national Scan for Safety programs undertaken by any health system in the United Kingdom. Spanning 14 territorial Health Boards, the regional organizations that run Scotland's public health services, along with the Golden Jubilee National Hospital, the program is transforming how medical devices are tracked, managed, and reported across an entire country.

Led by Public Services Delivery Scotland, formerly NHS National Services Scotland, the program was established to address a fundamental patient safety gap: the inability to rapidly trace high-risk implantable devices to the patients who had received them. In the event of a product recall, Health Boards relied on handwritten logbooks, manual searches, and significant clinical time. That process could take weeks or months.

Working in partnership with Genesis, NHS Scotland has implemented a national Clinical Lifecycle Management Platform on a specialty-by-specialty basis, building a consistent and scalable approach that can be replicated across every Health Board in Scotland. Genesis integrates seamlessly with existing inventory, finance, and patient record systems, removing the need for disruptive wholesale change while delivering immediate and measurable improvements in traceability, inventory management, and regulatory readiness.

The Challenge

Before Scan for Safety, clinical device documentation across NHS Scotland relied on paper-based processes that were time-consuming, inconsistent, and impossible to interrogate at scale. A product recall required staff to comb through physical logbooks filled with handwritten entries and barcode stickers. In larger Health Boards, where thousands of procedures are performed annually, this was an onerous undertaking that demanded substantial clinical time, often requiring an attending physician simply to decipher the records.

Andy Malyon, Consultant Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeon, the UK equivalent of an attending surgeon, and National Clinical Lead for the Scan for Safety program, describes the core problem with precision.

“The manual process is tedious, time-consuming, and anything that is tedious and time-consuming is by definition error prone. One of the most difficult things is having absolute confidence that you have not missed anybody.”Andy MalyonNational Clinical Lead, Scan for Safety Scotland

The clinical consequences of poor traceability are not theoretical. The PIP breast implant scandal and the Trilucent implant recall of the late 1990s both exposed the human cost of being unable to rapidly identify and contact affected patients. For the Trilucent recall, where the MHRA, the UK's medicines and medical devices regulator, issued guidance that implants should be removed following concerns about carcinogenic metabolites, the burden on clinical units that had used the device was considerable. Every affected patient had to be found. Without reliable electronic records, that search was exactly as difficult as it sounds.

A second challenge emerged through the COVID-19 pandemic. Inventory management across the NHS was exposed as a critical vulnerability, with shortages of essential supplies revealing how limited real-time inventory visibility was. The question asked within the program at the time was not simply how to recover from one pandemic, but how much better prepared the system could be for the next. Genesis's inventory management capability provided the immediate practical answer.

“We viewed the IMS system as a building block which addressed the immediate stock management need identified through COVID, and it established the platform foundation from which Scan for Safety has grown.”Simon WhiteNational Programme Director, Public Services Delivery Scotland

Scale and Complexity

The NHS Scotland Scan for Safety program is a genuinely national undertaking. Fourteen territorial Health Boards vary considerably in size and complexity, from the island boards of Shetland and the Western Isles to the large urban boards of Greater Glasgow and Clyde and NHS Lothian. Specialties also vary by board: while orthopedics and ophthalmology are present across most sites, specialties such as vascular surgery exist only in certain centers.

To manage this complexity, the program adopted a deliberate specialty-based rather than site-based approach. Rather than attempting to roll Scan for Safety out to every unit and operating room in a single Health Board simultaneously, the team focused on one specialty at a time.

This generated three practical advantages:

• It concentrated effort on the highest-risk, highest-volume device areas
• It kept the circle of stakeholders manageable
• It created a repeatable framework that could be applied consistently across boards and specialties

The program began with pilot implementations at the Golden Jubilee National Hospital and NHS Lothian. Those pilots generated the operational learning that shaped the national rollout approach. Golden Jubilee has since become the program's most mature site, with four specialties live since 2023, covering orthopedics, ophthalmology, cardiac procedures, and interventional radiology.

Why Genesis

Genesis was selected as the technology partner for the Scan for Safety program through an open and rigorous public procurement exercise, assessed against defined criteria covering patient safety, clinical, and operational requirements. Genesis scored highest across those criteria and was selected based on best value for money.

The platform offered the combination of clinical traceability capability, inventory management functionality, and integration potential that the program required. Its ability to integrate seamlessly with existing NHS systems, rather than requiring the replacement of established infrastructure, was a significant factor. Genesis operates as the connective layer within the clinical supply lifecycle, surfacing the right data at the right point without disrupting existing clinical workflows.

Implementation Approach

The phased, specialty-first model established through the pilot sites has remained the consistent approach for the national rollout. The implementation process involves significant upfront engagement with clinical and operational stakeholders before any go-live, with a designated senior lead in each Health Board responsible for internal communications and coordination.

Genesis has been present throughout the implementation process: on site during go-live periods, available by phone for technical queries, and willing to step beyond contracted scope when the program has needed it. In some implementations, particularly those involving complex physical inventory counts or intensive data hub testing, Genesis has stepped in at short notice to help a Health Board get across the finish line.

“There have been instances where it has been all hands to the pump. Genesis has always been willing and able. That responsiveness has made a material difference to implementation timelines.”Simon WhiteNational Programme Director, Public Services Delivery Scotland

Clinical Leadership and Adoption

One of the most significant early questions in any Scan for Safety implementation is how clinical staff will respond to a change in working practice. Operating room nurses, surgeons, and interventional radiologists are under constant time pressure, and any process that adds steps or friction to a clinical pathway will face resistance.

In NHS Scotland, the response has been consistently positive. Andy Malyon, who works directly with clinical teams as National Clinical Lead, attributes this to a fundamental characteristic of the system: it does not add to clinical workloads. It reduces them.

“It is that rare thing. An inventory management system that can actually save you time and enhance patient safety at the same time. Usually, things do one or the other, not both. And rarely do they do it with the potential time saving that this one does.”Andy MalyonNational Clinical Lead, Scan for Safety Scotland

For operating room nurses, who have historically carried much of the administrative burden of device documentation, the impact is immediate. A nurse in NHS Lothian described the change as cutting her workload considerably: no more writing things down, no more manual data entry. In NHS Highland, an inventory management lead began accessing Genesis reports independently and without prompting, using the data to present evidence to a local clinical group. This approach has been shared with other Health Boards through the national program delivery group. That kind of organic adoption is the most powerful indicator that the platform is delivering genuine utility.

Simon White is direct about the clinical response the program has encountered.

“Every conversation I have had with clinicians since taking on this role has produced a positive response. Everybody gets it, the benefits are obvious, and achieving that buy-in and support is critical.”Simon WhiteNational Programme Director, Public Services Delivery Scotland

Benefits

The program has defined three categories of benefit: patient safety, clinical productivity, and operational efficiency. Genesis tracks performance across six of the eight benefit areas defined by the program, with two further areas relating to clinical time monitored separately.

The aspiration is to aggregate benefit data from across all Health Boards into a national picture that can demonstrate the full return on investment to government and to Health Board finance directors. That work is actively in progress.

What is already clear, without waiting for aggregated data, is that the impact on individual sites is tangible. Genesis analytics are being used proactively for inventory management decisions in NHS Highland. Scan for Safety has enabled Health Boards to establish within hours whether devices named in field safety notices are present in their systems, a process that previously took weeks.

The Partnership

The working relationship between NHS Scotland and Genesis has been a consistent strength of the program. Over a multi-year implementation involving multiple Health Boards, multiple specialties, and a constantly evolving technical landscape, the relationship has remained open and collaborative.

Weekly conversations between the program team and Genesis provide a regular forum for reviewing progress and resolving issues quickly. When the program has needed Genesis to test something, provide information, or step beyond defined scope, the response has been consistent.

“I have worked with a number of suppliers over the years and relationships can wear thin over time. That has not happened here. It has always been open, transparent conversations. To me, this is a good example of excellent collaboration between a customer and a supplier.”Simon WhiteNational Programme Director, Public Services Delivery Scotland

The Data Horizon

Beyond the immediate patient safety case, the program is beginning to build something more significant: a national, near-real-time record of which devices are being implanted in which patients, in which hospitals, by which clinical teams. No comparable dataset exists at scale anywhere in the NHS today.

Andy Malyon has established a surveillance program within ophthalmology in Scotland, where approximately 45,000 intraocular lenses are implanted annually. The question he wants to answer is whether some devices are performing better than others, in which patient cohorts, and at what cost. His analogy is the National Joint Registry, the UK's implant outcomes registry, which has repeatedly been the first source cited in orthopedic patient safety notices.

“If there is a device which is performing better, we can ask the question: why are we not all using that device, especially if it is cheaper? That kind of intelligence simply does not exist at scale today. Scan for Safety creates the infrastructure to build it.”Andy MalyonNational Clinical Lead, Scan for Safety Scotland

The program is also exploring a connection with broader health intelligence held by Public Health Scotland, creating the potential for national-level insight into device performance, variation between Health Boards, and outcomes over time.

Regulatory Readiness

NHS Scotland has operated with regulatory compliance as a foundation rather than a finish line. The Scottish Government issued a direct communication to all Health Boards in January 2026, setting out that regulatory obligations were coming and that every Board must have a credible plan for 100 percent coverage in place. The program is providing the framework and platform to support Health Boards in meeting that obligation.

The target for the current program phase is at least one specialty live in every Health Board by the end of March 2027, with a structured transition period to achieve full specialty coverage thereafter.

Looking Ahead

With twelve months remaining in the current program phase, the focus is on completing the national rollout, deepening benefits realization across boards already live, and laying the groundwork for Health Boards to continue expanding coverage independently once the central program concludes. A medical device surveillance workstream is planned for the coming year, with ophthalmology the likely starting point given the volume and maturity of data already being captured.

The program is also developing its approach to benefit aggregation, ensuring that the national picture of what Scan for Safety has delivered can be clearly and confidently presented to government, to Health Board leadership, and to health systems around the world considering a similar journey.

About Genesis

Genesis is a Clinical Lifecycle Management Platform integrating seamlessly with existing ERP and EHR systems to deliver real-time traceability, inventory management, and analytics across The Clinical Supply Lifecycle. Working with health systems, hospitals, NHS Trusts, and Health Boards across the US, UK, and Ireland, Genesis delivers measurable improvements in patient safety, clinical efficiency, and financial performance.