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SCOTTISH HOSPITAL NEWS A REAL DRIVER FOR CHANGE


GREAT NEWS FOR EAST LOTHIAN HOSPITAL PATIENTS


Plans for East Lothian Community Hospital are moving forward with the news that the Outline Business Case, seen as the next major milestone for the project, will be submitted to the Scottish Government for approval this July.


‘There will be surgical services in the new hospital and demand for the type of procedures and treatments that will be carried out there are expected to increase significantly in the coming years,’ said Jim Crombie, Chief Officer, Acute Services, NHS Lothian. ‘This will mean that many more East Lothian residents will no longer have to travel for treatment. Around 2,500 residents who currently travel out with East Lothian for endoscopy, minor surgery and day case procedures will benefit from new surgical diagnostics and treatment facilities that will be created as part of the new hospital.’


There’s no doubt that the creation of the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow (QUEH) in 2015 generated many new challenges for the pharmacy service. The merging of four hospitals meant that the hospital - now one of the largest acute hospitals in the UK with almost 1,700 beds - had become something of a ‘mini city’, serving about 40 per cent of Scotland’s population.


‘Teething problems’ became obvious very quickly. For a start, pharmacists working in the hospitals that became QEUH did not have electronic access at the bedside to patient clinical information and so it wasn’t easy for them to prioritise the case load. Furthermore, when a patient moved location within the hospital, pharmacy-relevant information wasn’t always efficiently transferred, leading to potential duplication of triage and care planning.


Communicating key tasks and information about priority patients required a verbal handover and could not occur if a staff member was absent and another pharmacist had to visit the ward.


In short, a new way of working was


required that enabled hospitals to manage staff resource and match it to patient priority.


To help solve these problems, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, which runs QEUH, introduced PharmacyView, a web-based application which is available anywhere - including on the ward - via touchscreens, desktops, laptops and handheld mobile devices. The application sits above - but can be linked to - e-prescribing platforms such as JAC and Ascribe, or can be used as a standalone solution.


In addition to the fact that the product supports the NHS’ ambition to go paperless by 2018, it also:


• helps to reduce the amount of time pharmacists spend on administration through facilitating handovers, making it easier to identify priority patients, and expediting workload planning.


• gives pharmacists more control over their workloads, since they can more easily decide which patients they should see first based on need rather than


location in the hospital, such as those on high-risk drugs.


• notifies users if key tasks, such as medicines reconciliation, have not been completed on time


Pharmacists no longer need to look through paper-based documentation and can see at a glance, completed/ incomplete pharmacy-based requests and alerts, enabling a more safety- focused approach to the provision of patient care and eliminating unnecessary patient visits and assessments. Indeed, PharmacyView’s manufacturer, Nugensis, estimates that the application saves up to 30 minutes a day of each hospital pharmacist’s time.


Angela Munday, Lead Pharmacist, Patient Services at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, has first-hand experience of using PharmacyView and believes that it will help to deliver pharmaceutical care at scale.


‘In the past,’ she said, ‘it was difficult to provide continuity of pharmaceutical care when patients moved around the hospital or between hospitals. Patient turnover is so fast now that we need a system


to record all clinical pharmacy assessments that is immediately visible and follows the patient, which this application has helped us to achieve.


‘We can now more easily and quickly visibly record patient assessment on admission and prioritise individual patients rather than prioritising wards or clinical specialties. The system is intuitive and easy-to-use – even staff who are wary of new technology could use it after a two- minute demonstration.


PharmacyView will enable NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde to improve our workforce planning and prioritise the quality of care we give our patients.’


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