It is expected that all health boards in Wales will move to digital prescribing and medicines administration and will be procuring and implementing electronic prescribing and medicines administration (EPMA) as part of this change.
Some evidence to show how the paper process of prescribing currently happens
Regardless of the choice of EPMA system this will require changes to many processes, tasks and potentially roles, across prescribing, administering medicines, medicines management and discharge and what happens thereafter, across many different sites and specialist care settings (if not all).
This brings new opportunities to improve safety, as well as to improve the experience for patients and clinicians. But there are also constraints, new user needs, the ‘messy reality’ of day-to-day ways of working and existing systems and processes, barriers and drawbacks to understand.
Working as a small team within large organisations in Wales we collaborated with the people who are involved in the whole medicine journey from prescribing, dispensing, administering and arranging take home medication. Thins involved shadowing clinicians, nurses, pharmacists in various hospital settings and wards to learn about their needs and how they may be effected by EPMA.
What we found out showed what potential impacts of introducing EPMA could effect a ward and the people running them who are responsible for patient care. We gave the team we were working with a prioritised list of actions that included things like
Training
Hardware
Ward design
Culture change
Process change
Interoperability amongst systems
So they could then focus on the most urgent things to address when undergoing this large digital transformation.