Scunthorpe hospital part of Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with paper free prescribing this month using EMIS.
The hospital is the second of the trust’s hospitals to go live with the electronic prescribing and medicines administration (ePMA) system. Goole hospital staff started using the system in October 2019.
The trust was successful in bidding for national funding to rollout ePMA, announced earlier last year. Following the roll-out across the hospital, the trust will introduce the solution to Grimsby hospital.
Paulash Haider, assistant chief pharmacist, led the project “The launch is another big milestone for the project. We’re already seeing the benefits at Goole where staff have embraced the new way of working; fewer prescribing and fewer administering errors.”
“Scunthorpe is a bigger hospital so we’ve started with one ward and will continue to rollout ward by ward over the next few months. Staff are already getting to grips with the system and hand written prescriptions will soon become a thing of the past.”
Doctors can now use the system to check appropriate doses and to cross check for allergies as well as drug interactions while they are prescribing, removing the previous paper process. Nurses can see clearly what drug and dose has been prescribed and they can look up information on drugs at their fingertips rather than referring to the paper copy of the formulary. There’s also a clear record of who has administered what and when.
The trust said more than one hundred doctors, nurses and allied health professionals have been trained on the system ahead of launch.
Jodie Harrison, clinical sister “It’s easy to use and will make drug rounds more efficient once people have got used to the system. It will reduce the chance of potential errors in administration as it clearly highlights what medication, at what dosage is due at what time.”
