News

Pilot starts for SystmOne EPMA at Central & North West London

Two wards at Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust (CNWL) have gone live with SystmOne EPMA, as part of a pilot.

The two pilot sites are the first of the trust’s 52 mental health sites to introduce the electronic prescribing and medicines management tool, and to move away from a paper process.

The system has replicated the medication charts in use at CNWL, by making the tool appear ‘like the paper drug charts staff are familiar with’, TPP said.

During August, the CNWL team are to review the initial pilot, aiming to capture learnings to help structure support and training for the other locations. The trust then aims to introduce the system to six sites a month, and go live completely by April 2022.

Tom Hardy, Lead Clinical Systems Analyst, TPP, commented: “TPP is pleased to see SystmOne EPMA already beginning to assist staff at CNWL with their work and look forward to continuing to support them going forward in their roll out.

“EPMA will ensure that staff and patients in the area will benefit from comprehensive, well-managed and fully digitised medicines and prescription management.”

In January 2021, the trust introduced a new medicines dashboard for its mental health services. Using the clinical development toolkit in SystmOne, the trust developed the dashboard to provide staff with quick access to information, such as access to blood results, care plans and resources for patients and staff.

Yogita Dawda, Borough Lead Pharmacist, said: “As well as the advantages of having access to resources in one place which saves time and improves communication, the dashboard has supported remote working. Standardisation will allow better benchmarking and more meaningful and accurate reporting. It has also helped implement national standards requiring us to have registers of patients on high-risk medicines, thereby improving safety.”