Comment

Medicines management

Glen Hodgson, head of healthcare at GS1 UK, explains how standardising medicines management will improve patient experience and safety outcomes.

We hear time and again that the NHS wastes billions of pounds on preventable errors – many related to improper use of medication. This level of inefficiency can put patient safety at risk and increase pressure on healthcare professionals – and even subject trusts to costly negligence claims. 

This has led to much debate and reports into cost saving and efficiency in the NHS, the most recent of which is Lord Carter’s productivity review. His interim report highlights typical savings of £3m a year for every hospital that adopts GS1 standards – as well as improved patient safety. That’s £5bn across the NHS. 

The report also calls for the NHS to undergo a cultural change to bring about major efficiencies, or risk further losses. 

So, with so much reported wasted cash, inefficiency and poor patient outcomes, it’s clear that medicines management needs to be improved from the point of view of patient safety, service efficiency and cost. 

And let’s not forget about forthcoming legislation. The FMD (Falsified Medicines Directive) for those supplying and dispensing pharmaceuticals introduces measures to prevent the entry of falsified medicines into the legal supply chain. This means big changes for the way pharmacies manage and dispense medicines, requiring each product package to be scanned and checked against a national database. 

Just how do trusts improve their stock management and dispensing functionality in their pharmacy? Put simply, effective medicines management, or eMedicines. 

eMedicines 

eMedicines – founded on a common set of GS1 standards – puts patient safety first, by giving each and every medicine used across the NHS a unique identifier by pack and batch, whether bought-in or manufactured on-site. Each medicine and its use can be scanned, tracked and monitored from prescription to administration. This not only ensures a patient receives the right medicine when and where they need it, but means a hospital can be certain of exactly what medicines they have on-site, in what quantity and how they are used. 

This enables accurate stock management and provides data for patient-level costing. GS1 standards also enable tracking right down to batch number, eradicating the risk of administering recalled medicines. In fact, through the use of unique identifiers, recalled medicines can be identified, located and taken out of circulation without the hours, days and sometimes entire weekends spent turning store rooms upside down in search of medicines subject to a product safety recall. 

By building medicine management systems and processes based on standards, a trust can uniquely identify every patient, prescription and point of dispensing. This gives NHS trusts complete traceability and allows this information to be captured and shared automatically, whether it’s between departments and care professionals or between hospitals and their suppliers – in other words, true interoperability is achieved between people and systems. 

For example, this interoperability means a patient’s electronic record can be updated with a prescription, who prescribed it and when it was dispensed. Following the clinical check, a pharmacy receiving an ePrescription and using a robot can pick the medicine using the GS1 barcode, create the patient label and dispense the medicine almost instantaneously, with no errors – while significantly reducing the workload on the dispensary. 

Scanning the medicine’s barcode and the patient’s wristband creates a clear record of when the medicine was administered, which can be relayed back to the healthcare professional treating the patient. The pharmacy’s stock management system can re-order medicines automatically based on actual usage and accept deliveries into stock by scanning the product barcode which includes the batch, expiry date and serial number. 

Medicine stocks can then be managed based on strict expiry date rotation and recalled products can be identified by batch numbers and shelf-location. 

Patient experience 

This interoperability – even between a few of a hospital’s operational areas – enhances the patient experience, makes for quicker, safer and more effective treatment and reduces processing time, cost and administration errors. It gives trusts, and healthcare professionals, complete visibility. 

GS1 unique identification numbers can be applied to patients, medicines, surgical instruments, patient records and more. They provide a common foundation that, in turn, improves confidence in care delivery. Quite simply, they help ensure that a patient receives the right medicine, in the right dose, when and where they need it.

Tell us what you think – have your say below or email [email protected]