Electronic prescribing funding for 13 trusts

The Department of Health and Social Care has announced the first 13 trusts to receive a share of £78 million to support electronic prescribing and medicines administration (ePMA).

Seeking to improve patient safety, the new electronic systems will help hospital trusts move away from handwritten prescriptions, reducing potentially deadly medication errors by up to 50 per cent when compared with the old paper systems and helping to build up a complete electronic record.

Chosen because they provide a mixture of acute, mental health and community services, the 13 NHS trusts will receive a share of £16 million funding for 2018 to 2019, highlighting the benefits of full ePMA roll-out, making the most effective use of medicines and increasing the use of digital systems to generate additional data sets.

Former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced in February that the funding would be made available for trusts that had not made progress with implementing electronic prescribing, speeding up the implementation of ePMA across all trusts within the next three years to 2021.

Andrew Davies, director of Hospital Pharmacy at NHS Improvement, said: “There is evidence that electronic prescribing and medicines administration systems will improve safety for patients, reducing the risk of harm and ensuring high quality efficient patient care which is as safe as possible. I’m delighted so many trusts have submitted successful bids to accelerate the introduction of these systems to provide safer, better quality patient care. We are now looking for more trusts to bid for funding by the end of January.”

The first regional allocations are:

Bolton NHS Foundation Trust                                            £1,020,000
The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust                              £750,000
Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust                                   £1,600,000
Humber NHS Foundation Trust                                        £300,000
Northern Lincolnshire And Goole NHS Foundation Trust  £940,000
Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust            £820,000
University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust            £2,190,000
Barts Health NHS Trust                                                    £1,700,000
East London NHS Foundation Trust                                 £740,000
East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust      £1,450,000
Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust                             £1,170,000
Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust                          £1,620,000
East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust                                  £1,700,000