NEWS September 16, 2020

Basildon Hospital Begins Electronic Prescribing And Medicines Administration Roll-Out

Following their successful funding application, Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust have begun the ePMA roll-out at Basildon Hospital. The project, match-funded by the Trust, aims to increase patient safety by reducing the risk of prescribing and dispensing errors. 

As part of the project, the Trust needed to deploy a large number of mobile workstations across the hospital. They planned to use the Carts in two different areas, so chose two Carts to suit their workflow; the VersaLite MedDrawer Laptop Cart and the VersaLite Infinity Cart.

Mobile workstations will help deliver ePMA at the point of care, allowing for greater access to medicines, patient information and the electronic drug chart.

“ePMA is key to contributing to a paperless NHS by digitising the prescribing and administration of medicines and has shown to decrease the number of medication errors in hospital.”

Source: Article from Basildon and Thurrock Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

The first workstation that the Trust selected was the VersaLite Infinity Cart. This came with our All-In-One Infinity PC, possessing the processing speed, reliability and cleanability needed by the Critical and Intensive Care Units where infection control was an utmost priority. The Trust paired this workstation with an Its Cool Keyboard and C mouse – both able to be fully disinfected without risking damage or loss of functionality over time from regular cleaning, as opposed to standard peripherals.

The second workstation selected was the VersaLite MedDrawer Laptop Cart. As this workstation was going to be used during drug rounds on the wards, the Trust required some storage capability in order to access medication, bandages and notes while on the go to help with ePMA workflow.

Overall, the hospital aims to decrease medication errors by digitising the prescribing and administration of medicines. One such example is by removing the need to transcribe paper drug charts, as well as cases where hand-written prescriptions were often hard to read. With electronic drug charts accessible from anywhere in the hospital, often at mobile workstations, accessibility will be much improved across the organisation.

The mobile workstations will help to deliver greater access to clinical information when prescribing at the point of care through the Trust’s ePMA system.

With over 200 fully-built mobile workstations to be delivered to the hospital, the Trust didn’t have space to receive and then roll out all of the Carts at once. To ease the pressure, we arranged to store the Carts in our warehouse and operate phased deliveries to the hospital as and when they have the capacity to take them. This is a service we commonly offer to Trusts in order to help reduce strain on Trusts who may not have space or time to store and set-up each workstation before rolling them out into care areas.

To learn more about the products they used and find out how they can help your Trust, see our ePMA range.