Central & North West London NHS Foundation Trust goes live with SystmOne EPMA
Last month, two mental health wards run by Central & North West London NHS Foundation Trust (CNWL) went live with SystmOne EPMA. The 2 pilot sites are the first of CNWL’s 52 mental health sites rolling out EPMA and are already seeing the benefits of electronic management of medication and prescriptions.
“Introducing an EPMA system is always challenging but even more so during a pandemic”, notes Tf Chan, Chief Pharmacist at CNWL and Project Sponsor for the roll out of SystmOne EPMA. Despite current obstacles, SystmOne’s ease of use and intuitiveness has made the changeover much easier for staff. For example, medication charts in EPMA being set out like the paper drug charts staff are familiar with has helped teams quickly get started with using the system.
The change from paper to paperless also means information is accessible to all clinical staff that require it. Nurses no longer have to call the pharmacy searching for charts or ask doctors whether they can take charts for medicines rounds. Staff can access information when and where they need it thanks to a large screen installed on drug carts, in the nurses’ offices and in rooms where they conduct ward rounds. Doctors also now save half an hour a day that was previously spent rewriting drug charts to ensure consistency and accuracy. The rollout of EPMA is therefore helping reduce administrative work, freeing up staff time to focus on patient care.
SystmOne EPMA is bringing other benefits through standardising documentation. Staff can now see exactly who prescribed or administered medication so can easily contact the right person if they have any medication queries. In the case of patients refusing medication, staff formerly had no consistent method for documenting this but now can document these events by pressing a single button. This all contributes to a reduction in error plus better auditing and monitoring of care.
Error is further reduced by the ability to set medication review dates in the system. Staff can enter a date for review and count on the system to send a reminder, ensuring patients receive responsibly managed medication that is regularly reviewed.
These improvements to medicines administration through SystmOne EPMA have won over even initially sceptical staff who were understandably concerned about switching to a new system for administering medicines. One nurse on the ward did not like what she saw and experienced initially but, after two weeks of using SystmOne EPMA, said “I don’t like the system; I love the system.”
After the successful rollout of SystmOne EPMA at their first two clinical sites, the team at CNWL are using August to pick up on learning from the go lives and structure support and training for the other locations. They plan on managing six go lives a month from the early September and should have all 52 of their mental health sites live with EPMA by April 2022.
“TPP is pleased to see SystmOne EPMA already beginning to assist staff at CNWL with their work and look forward to continuing to support them going forward in their roll out,” says Tom Hardy, Lead Clinical Systems Analyst at TPP. “EPMA will ensure that staff and patients in the area will benefit from comprehensive, well-managed and fully digitised medicines and prescription management.”
Read more about SystmOne’s EPMA functionality here.