Abstract
The ethos of the pharmacy service at East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust (ELHT) could be described as ‘let’s make things better’. We have a history of innovation involving technology and people; one without the other does not work but together they are synergistic. The Trust currently does not have an electronic patient record (ePR) or electronic prescribing and medicines administration (ePMA), although we do have electronic prescribing for chemotherapy. However, like all Trusts, we have many electronic systems which offer interoperability, or can support making it easier for the pharmacy team to do a good job. This article describes the many fronts we have worked on over the last ten plus years. Taken individually, the elements cannot be considered as revolutionary; together, they have helped us develop and deliver the safe, personal and effective pharmacy service that we call dedicated ward pharmacy.
Highlights
Per ward, and either a dedicated ward pharmacy technician or one that is shared between two adjacent wards
This results in pharmacists participating in over thirty daily consultant-led multidisciplinary ward rounds in order to influence prescribing choices and safety, resolve medicines reconciliation queries, and gain intelligence on which patients are to be discharged in the near future
The report has enabled teamworking, to collectively tackle the admission and discharge workload. Another utility is the addition of a report to identify the numbers of patients on each ward who have been discharged without a discharge letter in the last 28 days
Summary
Transfer of care between care settings, including being discharged from hospital to the community, has traditionally been associated with a high risk of errors, exacerbated by miscommunication and unintended changes to medicines. Per ward, and either a dedicated ward pharmacy technician or one that is shared between two adjacent wards This results in pharmacists participating in over thirty daily consultant-led multidisciplinary ward rounds in order to influence prescribing choices and safety, resolve medicines reconciliation queries, and gain intelligence on which patients are to be discharged in the near future. Liaising with their pharmacy technician, they arrange for the medicines’ elements of transfer of care.
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