Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust has begun to use an integrated electronic prescribing and medicines administration (ePMA) solution provided by System C.
The company said Sheffield Children’s is the first paediatric trust in England to integrate CareFlow Medicines Management (CMM) with its own patient administration system (PAS) and other care coordination solutions.
The trust moved from paper drug cards to CMM over three weeks in September of last year, and is now planning a second phase for the remaining inpatient areas, outpatients, the emergency department, the Becton Centre and Ryegate Children’s Centre.
The move is part of its digital strategy aimed at achieving HIMSS EMRAM (Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model) Level 5 digital maturity accreditation by March 2025.
Clinical and operational teams at Sheffield Children’s were already using a suite of System C’s EPR solutions.
System C said that since the ‘go live’ on 11 September, over 1,200 staff have logged into CMM, issuing over 40,000 prescriptions for more than 4,000 patients.
Aiming high
Karen Bourne, lead pharmacist at Sheffield Children’s and Janet Doo, its matron for digital technology, said: “We wanted to aim high with our EPMA file build to optimise the system for our children and young people. We included additional functionality such as drug infusions and drug protocols to maximise the use of EPMA for our complex paediatric requirements.
“Our multi-disciplinary approach to the planning and vigorous in-house testing ensured a smooth and successful implementation. We found a face-to-face communication approach resulted in good engagement with our clinical leads, the executive board, and end users.”
