Avon and Wiltshire roll out controlled drug service

Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust has begun installing web-based software to help manage and track the dispensing of controlled drugs.

Ascribe’s Substance Misuse Service is being rolled out in two of the mental health units in the trust; West Wiltshire Specialist Drug and Alcohol Service and North Somerset SDAS, with the next phase being the rest of the units in the trust.

John Golding, drug and alcohol area manager at West Wiltshire SDAS, said that the trust "welcomes this system, as previously we had no computerised method of entering, managing or printing client prescription data.

"The reporting and analysis of our prescribing data should allow the trust to make more collective decisions regarding patient care and to implement best practice across our prescribing area."

Graham Lewis, CEO of Ascribe, explained: "Our system can be integrated with local patient administration systems, and is compliant with Connecting for Health interoperability and messaging standards."

As well as batch-printing prescriptions onto FP10 and FP10MDA paper, mandatory under the Misuse of Drugs Act, because the system is browser-based it can be updated to comply with legislation as it changes.

Ascribe say this is an improvement on other installed systems, which are less configurable and unable to provide multi-user access over a large area. Another advantage of the system, explained the company, is that it doesn’t get confused over public holidays.

The Substance Misuse Service system is also installed in several other mental health trusts in Birmingham, Lancashire, Rotherham and Berkshire.