The Solution

Prompted by a report of fatal medical tubing misconnection errors and ‘wrong-route’ drug administration, both the European Commission and the UK's Department of Health established groups of technical and clinical experts during the 1990’s to explore technical solutions, to help eliminate these incidents.

In 2000, the European standards organisation, CEN, published a report which recommended the development of a series of new connectors, which could be fitted to relevant medical devices  such as equipment tubing, syringes and needles, to help avoid misconnections.

The design of each connector type in the series would ensure that it could not be connected to any of the others, except to its own male/female 'pair'. The new connectors would also need to be incompatible with the 'luer' connector, since the ‘luer’ will still be widely-used.

Each new connector was to be assigned to a specific medical device 'function' e.g. ‘respiratory’, ‘enteral’, ‘vascular’, ‘urinary’, ‘blood-pressure cuffs’.

One 'function', not mentioned in the CEN report, but since picked up by the UK's Department of Health, was the need for a dedicated connector for use with equipment used for making 'neuraxial' injections (Neuraxial = around the nerves of the central nervous system).

The focus on this application arose from reports of 14 deaths in the UK, over a 10-year period, arising from injections of chemotherapy drugs, intended for intravenous administration, into patients’ spinal fluid. Recommendations for action, contained within two reports to the UK’s Chief Medical Officer, prompted the development by B-Link (UK) Ltd, of the Neurax® connector system.