Eleven Pans on a Trolley: Dosing Bedpans Ward by Ward in a 200-Bed Hospital

At 06:40 the bedpan trolley comes back to the sluice on a medical ward in a 200-bed district hospital with eleven pans stacked on it, and the healthcare assistant has about ninety seconds per pan before the breakfast round starts. That ninety seconds is the real specification. Whatever powder the hospital buys has to take 300 ml of urine from something that sloshes to something that survives a trolley ride, a lift, and a wait on the sluice floor until the porter does the 09:00 run.

Most sites get the arithmetic wrong in the same direction. They buy one scoop, apply it to every pan, and only discover in week two that two wards are burning through powder at twice the rate of the others. Dose is not a constant. It moves with volume, with concentration, and with how long the pan will sit before collection.

Count the pans before you count the kilos

A three-day tally, split by shift, is the cheapest piece of procurement work available. On a 200-bed site the total usually lands somewhere between 300 and 380 pans a day, but the average hides everything useful. A urology ward can run at 2.4 pans per occupied bed per day; a rehabilitation ward in the same building often sits at 1.2, because most of those patients walk to the toilet.

Record the tally per occupied bed, not per bed. Occupancy on a medical ward swings between 88 and 100 percent across a week, and a dose budget built on 200 beds when the ward is running 176 will look generous right up until the month it does not.

The dose table that fits on a trolley

A working table for a mid-range powder, roughly 0.7 g per millilitre of loose scoop volume, looks like this:

Those numbers assume normal concentration. They also assume the pan is swirled for five seconds rather than left to stand, because powder dropped into a full pan without movement will cap itself with a wet crust and stay dry underneath. The crust is the single most common cause of a pan arriving at the sluice with a solid lid and 300 ml of liquid beneath it.

Mark the pan, not the scoop

One hospital solved a persistent overflow problem by moulding a line into the inside of its pans at 400 ml. Staff could see at a glance whether a pan needed one scoop or two, without weighing anything or reading a chart. The line cost less per unit than the extra powder the site had been wasting on small volumes for two years.

Where the ward variation actually comes from

The orthopaedic ward is the one that usually breaks first. Post-operative patients on overnight intravenous fluids produce 500 to 700 ml in a single pan at 05:00, and they produce it fast. On one site, staff were using the standard one-scoop dose out of habit, and a pan left the ward at 07:10 still liquid. It went over the rim in the lift, and the clean-up took two staff twenty minutes and a carpet cleaning contractor.

The investigation found nothing wrong with the powder. The lot was fine, the absorbency checked out at 42 ml per gram in the site’s own bench test, and the same batch worked on every other ward. The failure was a dose table written for a 300 ml average being applied to a 650 ml reality. The fix was two scoop sizes, colour-coded, plus a rule that anything above the 400 ml line gets the larger one.

Night urine also behaves differently. It is usually more concentrated, which is good news for gel strength, but the volume arriving in one go is larger, because patients who are helped at 02:00 have often been holding on since 22:00.

Per shift, per ward, per trolley

Once the dose is fixed, the stock maths becomes simple. A ward doing 120 pans across a day at an average of 7 g needs roughly 840 g of powder a day. A 5 kg tub covers about six shifts, which means the trolley should carry a 2 kg container and be topped up at the 07:00 handover, not at 14:00 when the tub is empty and someone is hunting in the store cupboard.

Weigh the waste bag at the end of a late shift. Fourteen gelled pans at roughly 450 g each come to 6.3 kg, and that bag is being lifted into a wheeled bin by one person. If the bin is already half full of other waste, the lift goes past what most manual handling policies allow, which is a separate problem from dose but arrives on the same trolley.

If you are rebuilding the numbers from scratch, the dosing walkthrough at the urine solidification user guide covers the same volume-to-gram logic for pans, bottles and bags. Run the three-day count first, though. A dose table built on a real tally will hold for years; one built on a supplier’s average will be rebuilt within a quarter.