NEX begins a new UK pilot exploring how connected data and earlier insight can support safer care for children.
In April 2026, NEX founders Ash and Chang visited a specialist UK children’s hospital to begin setting up our latest clinical pilot.
The visit marked the start of implementation and gave us the opportunity to work directly with the hospital’s Infection Prevention and Control, clinical and digital teams.
Together, we began mapping existing workflows, understanding how infection data is reviewed, and planning how NEX will fit into the hospital’s systems and ways of working.
This is an important milestone for NEX because paediatric infection prevention brings its own distinct challenges.
Infection Prevention in Children Has Unique Challenges
The risks, organisms and patterns of healthcare-associated infection can differ considerably between adults and children.
England’s latest national point-prevalence survey found that 11.4% of hospitalised infants aged between one and 11 months had at least one healthcare-associated infection. The prevalence was 6.0% among children aged one to nine and remained around 5% among older children and adolescents. Across patients of all ages, infection prevalence was particularly high among those with longer hospital stays and invasive devices. Read the UKHSA survey →
The risk is greatest among the most vulnerable children. European research involving UK investigators found that approximately one in six children in paediatric intensive care and one in ten babies in neonatal intensive care had a healthcare-associated infection at the time of the survey. Bloodstream and respiratory infections were the most commonly identified. Read the Imperial summary →
A separate UK paediatric intensive-care study found that children who developed an HCAI had a median hospital stay of eight days, compared with three days among those without one. Children with HCAIs were also much more likely to have underlying health conditions, while more than a quarter of the infections identified were caused by resistant Gram-negative organisms. Read the study →
The exact figures vary between studies and clinical settings, but the wider message is consistent: younger children, critically ill patients and those with complex conditions can face a disproportionate risk from infections acquired during care.
Complexities of Infection Prevention
Specialist children’s hospitals bring together paediatric intensive care, surgery, oncology and other highly specialised services. Children may move between wards, diagnostic areas, theatres and critical-care environments during the same admission.
Infection Prevention and Control teams must often reconstruct these journeys manually, bringing together microbiology or virology results, admission and transfer records, bed movements and clinical context held across different systems.
The paediatric context also makes interpretation more complex. The significance of an organism can vary with a child’s age, symptoms, underlying conditions and recent healthcare exposure. Some vulnerable children can carry or shed respiratory viruses for longer, while C. difficile colonisation and disease require particularly careful interpretation in younger patients.
During winter, hospitals must also manage large numbers of children with RSV, influenza and other respiratory infections while protecting the most vulnerable patients and maintaining limited isolation capacity. Current UK paediatric guidance warns that hospital-acquired respiratory infections are associated with worse outcomes, longer stays and higher rates of admission to intensive care. Read the RCPCH guidance →
This creates a need for infection intelligence that reflects the specific clinical and operational realities of paediatric care.
Using NEX
The pilot will initially explore how NEX’s Infection Intelligence can support the earlier identification and control of C. difficile, before potentially expanding to selected winter respiratory viruses.
NEX’s advanced intelligence models will analyse patterns across the hospital to help predict which children may be at greater risk of acquiring an infection, where possible transmission may have occurred, and where infection could spread next.
This will give the Infection Prevention and Control team a more timely view of possible cases, emerging clusters and shared exposures helping them focus their attention where earlier action could have the greatest impact.
Learning What Works in Paediatric Care
Over the coming months, we will work closely with the hospital through technical implementation, workflow configuration, user onboarding and evaluation.
The pilot will examine whether NEX can reduce manual work, improve the speed and consistency of outbreak investigation, and provide earlier visibility of infection risks. Feedback from paediatric clinicians and Infection Prevention and Control teams will also help us understand how the platform should be adapted for children’s hospitals.
For NEX, this pilot is an opportunity to demonstrate how infection intelligence can support a different and particularly important care setting helping clinical teams protect some of the hospital’s most vulnerable patients.
