Chesterfield Royal Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has successfully rolled out electronic prescribing at its second attempt.
JAC’s electronic prescribing and medicines administration is now live on all the hospital’s surgical, orthopaedic and medical wards, as well as in theatres.
Head of medicines management Martin Shepherd told eHealth Insider the trust had tried to roll out e-prescribing some years ago, but had failed because of low user acceptance.
“It was, in part, at a time when ward staff were less familiar with using IT in a clinical environment.
"There were significantly more paper-based systems around; this was prior to digital imaging and at a time when people in their personal lives used much less IT.”
However, increased user acceptance and enhanced wireless infrastructure has made the recent e-prescribing project much more successful.
The trust has been working since May 2010 to implement the system, and aims to have its remaining wards live by March 2012. These will be obstetrics, gynaecology, paediatrics and day surgery.
“We always had in mind to have this completed by March next year, but we wouldn’t have expected to make the rapid progress that we have done," Shepherd said. "We expected to have a much slower roll out.”
Shepherd said the investment in wireless technology meant staff were able to access the system through a mobile workstation.
The trust spent £57,000 on workstations from Bristol Maid. These house a laptop with the EPMA system available through the wireless network.
Shepherd said the new wireless infrastructure was also being used to increase performance in other areas of the hospital.
Other systems such as electronic lab results and picture archiving and communications are also being accessed at the patient’s bedside.
The trust believes that the implementation of e-prescribing will increase patient safety.
“It is widely recognised that electronic prescribing systems improve the legibility of prescriptions and remove the possibility of prescriptions being misplaced or lost," Shepherd said.
© 2011 EHealth Media.
