Team of the year at last year’s BT e-Health Insider awards was won by NHS Pathways. The runners up in the category sponsored by NHS Connecting for Health were teams from Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children and Stockport NHS Foundation Trust.
Electronic Prescribing in Children: Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children
Responding to a national drive to tackle the problem of paediatric medication errors, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust became the first UK children’s hospital to implement an electronic prescribing system. The multidisciplinary team included doctors, nurses, pharmacists, change agents and staff from the ICT department at the hospital, together with academics at the Centre for Paediatric Pharmacy Research. Evaluation shows that the electronic prescribing system has enhanced patient care by reducing prescribing medication errors. The system has been well accepted by staff and is being rolled out across the entire trust. The system has had to be reduced in scope recently due to infrastructure work. A full service is expected to be restored in 2009.
Electronic Ordering of Pathology Tests: Stockport NHS Foundation Trust
Within eight months, a multi-disciplinary team from Stockport has successfully transformed the way clinicians order pathology investigations, not only from the in-patient wards, but also from outpatient and pre-operative environments. In October 2007, only 5% of pathology requests were made online, compared to 92% in June 2008. More than 192,000 orders have been placed so far. The project was preceded by real time recording of admissions, discharges and transfers by nursing staff at ward level, using iSoft’s Patient Centre.