Bleed Control UK: automating compliance for a national kit network

The original problem

First aid and bleed control kits need to be checked regularly to make sure their contents are in date, compliant with current guidance, and replaced whenever they have been used. With kits distributed across many dispersed locations nationwide, Bleed Control UK found this difficult to track and easy to get wrong. There was also no easy way for the public to see where kits were actually located, which limited how much trust people could place in the network being complete and current.

The manual process before the project

Before this project, keeping track of kit contents, expiry dates and replacement needs relied on manual checking and record-keeping, without a central system built for the job. Each kit represented a small ongoing administrative task, multiplied across a nationwide network, with no automated way to flag when something needed attention.

The risks of leaving it manual

A manual, dispersed tracking process carries clear risks for an organisation whose kits exist to be ready in an emergency. Expired or depleted kit contents could go unnoticed until someone needed them. Compliance information could become inconsistent or out of date across locations. Because the public had no visibility of where kits actually were, the charity also had limited ability to demonstrate the reach and reliability of its own network.

The agreed approach

Working with Bleed Control UK, the agreed approach was to move kit tracking out of manual processes and into a proper compliance system, built specifically to track kit data and expiry dates, flag problems automatically, and make kit locations visible to the public through the charity’s own website.

What was built

The work delivered four connected pieces:

• A compliance portal for centrally tracking kit data and expiry dates across every location.
• An automation system that alerts the Bleed Control UK team when kits are approaching expiry, removing the need to chase this information by hand.
• A website API integration, connecting the compliance portal to the charity’s public-facing website so kit locations are visible to the public.
• Architecture built to support future growth, so the system can expand as the charity’s kit network grows, rather than needing to be rebuilt.

How the team stayed involved

The compliance portal and alerting system were built to support the Bleed Control UK team’s ongoing oversight of the kit network, rather than to remove people from the process. The automation flags upcoming expirations for the team to act on; it does not replace the judgement or action of the people responsible for compliance.

The result

Once the new system was in place, Bleed Control UK had centralised compliance tracking in place of a manual, dispersed process. Because expiry alerts are now automated, the team spends less time manually chasing expiry dates across the network. The public-facing kit locations, made possible by the API integration, give people visibility of where kits actually are, supporting public trust in the network.

No specific numeric results, such as percentages, hours saved or cost figures, are confirmed for this project, and none are claimed here.

The next stage

Because the system was built with future growth in mind, it is positioned to expand alongside Bleed Control UK’s kit network as it grows, without needing to be rebuilt from scratch.

A project like this in your organisation

If your organisation is relying on manual checks, spreadsheets or dispersed records to track something that really matters, it is worth a conversation about where a more automated, centralised system could help. The thinking behind this kind of work is explained under workflow automation, and you can see how projects start under AI consultancy. Or go back to all case studies.