Customer stories
Electronic prescribing in mental health
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Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT) provides mental health, substance misuse and disability care services. Ensuring safe, effective prescribing for vulnerable patients is paramount to enable them to achieve positive care outcomes.
Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT) provides mental health, substance misuse and disability care services. Ensuring safe, effective prescribing for vulnerable patients is paramount to enable them to achieve positive care outcomes.
Safer prescribing through integration
The electronic prescription and medicines administration (ePMA) system is integrated with the trust’s other clinical IT systems, and provides clinicians with decision support so that safer prescribing is carried out and both patient harm and litigation are avoided.
The closed loop between pharmacy and prescribing
The trust has integrated the ePMA system with their electronic Medicines Management (eMM) and Pharmacy Stock Control Robotic Dispensing systems, also provided by EMIS Health. This means the prescription is clinically screened by a pharmacist then supplied automatically without any need for manual transcription, saving staff time and money, whilst providing a quicker, safer service to the patient.
Steve Bazire, consultant pharmacist, commented “The ePMA system ‘is one’ with the pharmacy system, so once a medicine is prescribed, it comes straight through to a pharmacist clinical checking screen, or on a ward, and then straight through to the pharmacy system. The level of controls and flexibility is now quite remarkable and also robust. The potential benefits via management of prescribing, lack of transcription and no faxing of prescriptions are going to be enormous.”
The ePrescribing system is a massive time saver – I’m really impressed
Improved efficiencies
Full audit and analysis of treatments enables the trust to cross-reference with their efficacy, to allow best practice to evolve from the emerging evidence provided by the ePMA solution. Dr Trevor Broughton, Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist at NSFT said: “It would’ve taken me at least three times as long to write everything by hand. The ePrescribing system is a massive time saver – I’m really impressed.”
Describing the approach and implementation of the solution, Lizzie Meadows, ePrescribing Clinical Systems Implementation Manager at NSFT added: “The rigorous development of ePMA together with consistent pragmatic support from EMIS Health has ensured that NSFT electronic prescribing launch has been robust, seamless and has had a wholly positive effect on service users’ drug administration.”