Project aims
The goal of the project is to understand the needs and views of those directly involved in prescribing, dispensing, administering, managing and receiving medicines in hospitals (secondary care) in Wales.
Through this discovery, we hope to show health boards and local implementation teams the risks and opportunities of moving to ePMA in hospitals, so they can prepare safely, select the best options and implement in a way that provides most benefit.
Our mission is to:
- understand the end-to-end user journey for electronic prescription services
- use digital solutions to make prescribing, dispensing and administering medicines in Wales easier, safer, and more efficient and effective
We want to make sure services deliver the best outcomes for citizens, and are designed around how citizens and service providers want to use and manage those services…
we know that not everyone can, or wants to, access online services; therefore, ensuring that the solution is digitally inclusive is a key priority of the programme.
The problem we're solving
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.
Partners
Digital Health and Care Wales (DHCW) are our partners in this discovery project.
We are working with subject matter experts from the Digital Medicines Transformation Portfolio to conduct user research with the people who are directly involved in prescribing, dispensing or administering medicines in hospitals.
A summary of the work
On this project, we have:
- read over 38 reports of previous research and findings on ePMA
- conducted over 9 hours of stakeholder interviews to understand the expectations of ePMA
- 6 hours of interviews with existing users of ePMA systems