Safe NG tube placement isn’t only a patient-safety issue. It’s a resource one — for every health system, whether funded by taxes, insurance or out of pocket.

When placement is uncertain, the consequences add up quickly: repeat insertions, confirmatory X-rays, transport, clinician time, and delayed feeding for a patient who needs nutrition or medications now.

A widely cited US study of blind feeding-tube placement (de Aguilar-Nascimento & Kudsk, JPEN, 2007) found an average of 3.7 X-ray films per patient, multiple tube insertions, and an airway-misplacement rate of 3.2%. Every one of those X-rays is time, money, and radiation exposure — multiplied across a busy ward, every day, in every country. This doesn’t even include the recovery time and costs associated with lung injury.

If a tube can be placed and checked more confidently at the bedside — with fewer repeat attempts and fewer “just to be sure” X-rays — the benefit is felt by the patient and the system.

That’s exactly the problem we designed DoubleCHEK to help with: a simple bedside check that gives clinicians more information, earlier, with the potential to reduce reliance on confirmatory X-rays.

Source: de Aguilar-Nascimento JE, Kudsk KA, Clinical Costs of Feeding Tube Placement, JPEN, 2007.