Kent’s Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust has moved to electronic prescribing, replacing a paper based process.
The trust has implemented the Better electronic prescribing system and integrated the technology into its electronic patient records (EPR) system for its 18 adult inpatient wards at the Darent Valley Hospital.
Plans are underway to roll out the system in its outpatient clinics, maternity and paediatric wards and inpatient wards at the Queen Mary’s Hospital
Over a single weekend, a clinical team digitised 500 paper drug charts and 8,000 prescriptions by transcribing them into the electronic prescribing system. Electronic prescribing systems should improve the legibility and level of information clinical staff have available to them. The system also provides details of drug interactions, allergy checks and high-dose alerts along with dose-level data reporting and analysis.
Julia Scott, pharmacist and senior responsible owner for the EPR programme, said: “This implementation will allow us to deliver medication safety improvements on a whole system scale. We can also build data driven safety nets to allow us to rapidly identify potential high risk prescribing and intervene quickly.
"It is genuinely transformative when it comes to a human factors approach to safety”.
Dr Guy Sisson, chief clinical informatics officer at Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust, said: “The implementation was an incredible effort with months of planning, which led to over 200 healthcare staff from across the integrated care system joining forces to support the go-live weekend."
This latest implementation follows the introduction of an EPR in 2019 at the trust.
