Dakota Daily Wristband Shipments Helped Keep The NHS Running During Pandemic

When Boris Johnson announced a national lockdown in March 2020, the severity of the Coronavirus pandemic was becoming a frightening reality as well as the resulting impact that it would have on NHS staff and services.

Dakota Integrated Solutions Ltd has a rich history in supplying fit-for-purpose technology to over 200 NHS Trusts, due to its close working relationships with Framework Resellers and the NHS Supply Chain and specialises in a range of healthcare applications including bedside point of care, positive patient identification, track and trace, domiciliary care, asset tagging and inventory control.

When the ‘stay at home’ strategy was initiated in an attempt to try to reduce the effect of the pandemic on the nation’s healthcare resources, Dakota realised that it had to act in order to help support the NHS in providing the best possible level of care to its patients whilst under extreme and unprecedented pressures.

Instead of insisting that all its office workers had to stay at home, Dakota brought in a skeleton staff in order to maintain its supply of wristbands to the NHS in their hour of need. Thanks to its onsite warehouse adjacent to its offices, Dakota was able to hold stock of a large amount of Zebra wristbands so that daily deliveries to NHS facilities all around the country could still take place. In total, Dakota has supplied in excess of 22 million wristbands to the NHS during the past 18 months.

Keith Hardy, Managing Director at Dakota, comments "We were determined to support the NHS in any way that we could during this extraordinary and unusual situation.  By bringing back a few members of the team as well as employing temporary staff in order to cope with the huge number of wristband deliveries and shipments, we were able to maintain our support of the NHS by processing all orders and continuing our wristband consignments when they were needed the most. Hospitals were becoming overwhelmed and we wanted to ensure hospital workers, staff and clinicians had everything they needed at all times in order to cope with the vast influx of patients. Shipments were leaving our warehouse on a daily basis and we made sure that there was always someone on hand to handle these – we never missed a day. I am extremely grateful that Brian agreed to postpone his retirement to assist with our efforts and I am so proud of how the staff here at Dakota pulled together in order to do their part to support the NHS during the pandemic and will continue to do so in the future."