In its most recent board meeting, South West Yorkshire Partnership Teaching NHS Foundation Trust shared updates around electronic prescribing, highlighting progress on EPMA and a 12-month plan for roll out of the electronic prescription service across three phases.
EPMA has recently been successfully rolled out at Cheswold Park Hospital in Doncaster, the trust reports, replacing inpatient paper medication charts with an electronic medication chart within SystmOne. Feedback from staff has been positive, it continues, specifically highlighting improvements to patient safety.
On the electronic prescription service, South West Yorkshire states that planning is currently underway for roll out in community mental health, with three phases to be carried out over a 12-month period. Phase one will focus on adult ADHD with a small scale pilot with one team to test the process. Phase two will then look to CAMHS and community mental health teams for wider scale implementation, to include “most of the teams and services in scope”. Finally, work is being carried out for phase three to identify teams in scope, including community learning disabilities, and community forensic.
The trust hopes to see benefits such as increased efficiency through reduced paper processes, visibility of prescriptions via the prescription tracker, reduced chances of missing prescriptions, and reduced time spent handling prescriptions. It also expects to see cost savings as a result of the rollout. Awareness sessions will be held on Microsoft Teams over the next few months, with more details to be shared in the near future.
Wider trend: Electronic prescribing
For an HTN Now webinar, we explored the impact of EPMA, taking a closer look at its role in increasing efficiency and accuracy in prescribing, in improving patient safety, and some of the challenges with introducing and implementing EPMA systems. Our expert panellists, Fhezan Ashraf, senior pharmacist clinical configuration manager at The Dudley Group; and Hui Yi Lee, advanced clinical pharmacist & EPMA clinical lead at Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust shared their own experiences and insights, detailing outcomes, challenges, engagement, design, interoperability and training.
Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board has celebrated the go-live of electronic prescribing and medicines administration at Wrexham Maelor Hospital, and become the first Welsh health board to achieve ePMA integration with the shared medicines record. The transition to an ePMA provided by Better follows a successful early adopter trial with the Heddfan Unit in December, the board shares. G0-live took place over three days, with clinical teams working to manually transcribe 600 inpatients onto the system prior to introducing ePMA as part of routine care.
University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust has shared successes from 2024-25 and next steps for digital in medicines management, focusing on digital system upgrades and improving electronic prescribing uptake. In March 2025, the trust upgraded to the latest version of its CareFlow Medicine Management software to facilitate eprescribing and pharmacy stock management. While this move “mitigated several risks associated with electronic prescribing and medicines administration and provided benefits for pharmacy contract management”, teams continue to monitor impact and risks. Uptake and utilisation of outpatient electronic prescribing “remains low”, the trust reports, with 12,500 prescriptions created in the last six months. To tackle this, a link between the outpatient module and the outpatient prescribing module has been created and is entering its final stage of testing and validation.
