Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in West London has become the first NHS hospital in London to use full electronic prescribing of medication for adult inpatients. Doctors can now prescribe drugs and nurses can record administration of medicines at a patient’s bedside using wireless handheld tablet PCs, which closely resemble the screens on a Nintendo DS console. It should mean that errors caused by doctors’ handwriting will become a thing of the past.
Following the introduction of electronic prescribing for outpatients and patients discharged from hospital, there has been a 97% decrease in discrepancies relating to prescriptions which mainly relate to legibility issues.
The electronic prescribing system being used at Chelsea and Westminster not only allows doctors to use the tablet PC to prescribe medicines for patients but also has a back-up “decision support” system to improve the quality and safety of prescribing.
