2,500 Newcastle staff using Millennium

Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has completed the roll-out of the Cerner Millennium medicines management system across the Freeman Hospital.

The trust went outside the National Programme for IT in the NHS to contract for a University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre implementation of Millennium. 

It went live with the first elements of the system six months ago and has since been extending it across its three main hospitals. 

There are now more than 2,500 staff accessing the system at an average of four times a day, and Cerner and UPMC are no longer on-site.

The trust started the medicines management roll-out at the beginning of December in a 30 bed nephrology inpatient ward, and has now deployed the system across 27 wards at a rate of 2-3 wards per week.

On a visit to the trust earlier this week, Steve Leggetter, e-records programme director, told E-Health Insider: “We’ve been going live with three wards a week, looking at the medicines charts patient by patient and then working with the project leaders and pharmacists ward by ward.”

The is still using its McKesson PAS in ‘enquiry only’ format for a number of staff. It is also continuing to use some paper process alongside electronic medicines management until two remaining speciality areas, ICU and paediatrics, have gone live with the system. This is likely to happen over the summer.

The trust has also completed the roll-out of order communications at the Freeman and started implementing the system across the Newcastle General Hospital earlier this week.

It will go live with order communications and medicines management at the Royal Victoria Infirmary over the summer and will implement functionality to allow electronic signatures on results.

“There is a six week point from where we make the decision to roll out and go-live to actually doing it in terms if readiness and getting training sorted,” Leggetter said.

Read more about Sarah Bruce's trip to see Cerner Millennium at Newcastle six months on in the opinion and analysis All Tooned Up.

Watch our video interview with Steve Leggetter in EHI TV.