Hospital Pharmacist
Vol 10 No 4 p141
April 2003

News summary

Hospital pharmacists win IT awards

Hospital pharmacists played a key role in two successful projects at the "2003 Healthcare IT Effectiveness Awards".

A project from the Wirral Hospital NHS Trust and Wirral Child Care Health Services to reduce risks in prescribing for children won third place in one category. The multidisciplinary team built on existing electronic prescribing pathways, redesigning those for the relatively small number of drugs they identified as being commonly prescribed for children. The new pathways guided clinicians to the appropriate dose, based on the child's age, for drugs with a wide therapeutic index, or on their weight. Once introduced into clinical practice, error rates for paediatric specialists fell from 26 per cent to 4 per cent, and for non-paediatric specialists, from 76 per cent to less than 7 per cent, a factor that greatly impressed the judges.

This work was featured at last year's Hospital Pharmacist conference (Hosp Pharm 2002;9:290).

Keith Farrar, chief pharmacist at Arrowe Hospital in the Wirral, told Hospital Pharmacist how impressive it is that two pharmacy-related projects made it to the finals, which cover the whole health care sector, for the second year running.

A commendation went to the DrugInfoZone project, designed and run by the medicines information team at Guy's Hospital. DrugInfoZone promotes the safe and effective use of medicines by providing healthcare professionals with "up-to-date evidence-based information and knowledge about medicines delivered quickly, cost-effectively and seamlessly". Dr Shapour Hariri, director of e-communications for the London & South East Medicines Information Service based at Guy's echoed Mr Farrar and stressed how active pharmacy was in the IT arena.

Details of how to enter for 2004 can be found here.