2.2. How we supported health

We signed a partnership agreement with Digital Health and Care Wales and provided support to their Digital Medicines Transformation Portfolio.

The programme aims to use digital solutions to make prescribing, dispensing, and administering medicines in Wales easier, safer, and more efficient and effective.

“I see great and real benefits to this partnership. It will allow us to understand the impact of removing paper from the system and to select and deliver the technology that meets the needs of NHS Wales.

We know that not everyone wants to use online services. It’s therefore vitally important that a significant new development that will impact everyone who uses NHS Wales services is digitally inclusive.

Bringing our expertise together provides us with the forward thinking and insight needed to deliver the very best digital medicines solutions for the people of Wales.”

- Helen Thomas, Chief Executive Officer, Digital Health and Care Wales

Objective 2: Support others to ensure that people can access digital public services by helping them create services that are designed around user needs

Objective 5: Continuing to promote shared use of the technologies and create and embed common and shared standards in digital, data and technology

Objective 6: Actions to help business in Wales better meet the digital transformation needs of public services

Five Ways of Working: Long-term, integration, involvement, collaboration, prevention

7 well-being goals: A healthier Wales, a more equal Wales, a globally responsible Wales

Responding to an independent review, the Minister for Health and Social Services set out her ambition for a comprehensive digital medicines plan for Wales in September 2021 and asked Digital Health and Care Wales to establish the Digital Medicines Transformation Portfolio.

The Digital Medicines Transformation Portfolio brings together programmes and projects that will make prescribing, dispensing, and administering medicines everywhere in Wales, easier, safer, more efficient, and more effective, through digital.

As part of our partnership, we worked with the team to understand the challenges and risks of removing paperwork in the following services:

Electronic Prescription Services (EPS) in a primary care setting – used by GPs and non-medical staff who prescribe, dispense, administer, and manage medicines in GP surgeries and pharmacies

Electronic Prescribing and Medicines Administration (ePMA) in a secondary care setting – used by healthcare professionals who prescribe, dispense, administer, and manage medicines in hospitals

EPS in a primary care setting

We focused on 3 areas:

Dispensing tokens – patients who hand their paper prescriptions to the pharmacist to collect their medicine

Dispensing practices – a practice that prescribes and dispenses medicine for patients

Cross-border – patients who need medicine prescribed and dispensed across the Welsh/English border

We conducted in-depth user interviews with over 30 people and ran 6 workshops looking at repeat prescriptions, health record access and appointment bookings.

We shared a summary of the findings and the options for how to progress with the senior responsible owners for the overall portfolio, as well as for the primary care programme board, giving the rationale, data, and stories behind the recommendations, to support their decision-making.

We also discussed how a test, learn, and iterate approach could work for each area of focus, rather than attempting to identify one option when there are several constraints and uncertainties.

ePMA in a secondary care setting

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.

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.

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.

We supported the team to understand the needs and views of those directly involved in prescribing, dispensing, administering, managing, and receiving medicines in hospitals in Wales.

Our final report included recommendations about how to:

prepare for the change
define success
adopt user-centred approaches

define clinical requirements
focus on usability
prepare the current infrastructure, including wifi and devices

“Putting patients and healthcare professionals at the heart of our design is essential to delivering effective services that work for the people who use them.

We are thrilled to be working with the CDPS and look forward to putting the findings into action.”

- Rhian Hamer, Portfolio Director of Digital Medicines Transformation Portfolio

Upskilling the health sector

From January to March 2023, our Skills and Capabilities team, trained 150 people working in the health sector on their ‘Digital and Agile’ courses, along with Agile training for teams and leaders.

Looking back: CDPS year in review 2022 to 2023