Pharmacies say EPS not yet a viable proposition
GP surgeries are not yet producing enough barcoded prescriptions to make dispensing via the electronic prescription service feasible, according to some pharmacy groups. The latest data from NHS
Connecting for Health show that an average of 20 per cent of daily prescriptions are prescribed electronically but only 2 per cent are dispensed via the service.
Andy Charlesworth, commercial IT manager for Numark, told The
Journal that around 90 per cent of the pharmacies operating Numark Assist have
the capability to scan barcoded prescriptions.
“The feedback we
are getting from some of our members is that not all surgeries are printing
barcoded prescriptions. In some cases this is because the surgeries haven’t
received the required visit that enables their IT system to do it. However,
I have heard that some GPs are cynical about the whole process.”
Wahid Muhammad, head of software development at Pharmacy Plus, a group
based in Bristol that has developed an in-house system, said that although
it received accreditation a while ago, the volume of electronic prescriptions
the company receives is too low to justify use of the service.
“Pharmacy Plus operates a central dispensary site catering for
the prescription needs of over 150 nursing homes in the south west region.
This equates
to roughly 20,000 prescriptions a month, with fewer than 1,000 being
ETP scripts. This isn’t enough for us to justify moving our process
to rely on ETP.”
All pharmacies at Rowlands are enabled to dispense using the EPS system
but Jennifer Thomas, the company’s NHS fund manager, explained
that this has taken significant manpower to achieve. Obstacles have arisen
because of the lack of standardisation of procedures across primary care
trusts, affecting both the registration and issuing of smartcards as
well as the validation process that leads to payment of the monthly EPS
allowance, she said.
“The programme will only be successful when
pharmacy as a whole is fully engaged. As yet there has been little, if
any, advantage in it doing so,” she added.
Gareth Jones, NHS liaison manager at the National Pharmacy
Association, said that although there are few immediate benefits in using
the system
at the moment, there is concern that more experience has not been gained
in the release 1 test phase before progress to the business critical
release 2.
“We recommend that pharmacists use the EPS wherever
practical, even if this is as a test after they have dispensed the prescription,” he
says.
By doing this, pharmacists can check to see if the system is working
and report any problems to their system supplier.
“We hear that pharmacists are experiencing problems but they do
not seem to be reporting them, perhaps because they think someone else
will have
already done so. Until pharmacists raise these issues with their supplier
the problems cannot be addressed. If the supplier is unable to resolve
the problem then it should be referred on to NHS CfH.”
Initial implementations for release 2 of the EPS are now likely to start
during spring or summer 2008. |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal
Acrobat
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