Darent Valley takes healthy approach to labelling with Episys

Published 4th February 2010

Darent Valley Hospital, part of Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust, has implemented Episys’ Ultimate Labelling solution to improve medicines re-labelling across the organisation.

Background

Darent Valley Hospital opened in 2000 and is a 478 bed acute district general hospital. It has an Accident & Emergency Department and hosts an Urgent Care Centre managed by the Primary Care Trust.

The hospital has an annual budget of about £129 million and employs circa 1,900 staff.

Challenge

One of the Pharmacy Department’s key concerns was that it had an ageing and inflexible aseptic unit labelling platform. If the platform was to fail it would be unable to label the cytotoxic products which it supplies to the cancer chemotherapy service.

John Richardson, Director of Pharmaceutical Services at Darent Valley Hospital, explained, “We needed a product that would give us the flexibility to better label existing chemotherapy products produced by our aseptic production suite. This was particularly important as our production suite operates under Section 10 exemption of the Medicines Act, which means that we can only supply aseptic products to named patients (no batch production is permissible).”

The unit needed to invest in new technology to keep up-to-date with changing requirements and rising patient expectations in the NHS. Richardson said, “While the demands of a licensed unit are possibly greater than that of a Section 10 unlicensed unit, we still needed a software solution that could meet the growing capacity demand that we’re likely to face at Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust.”

Solution

The hospital selected the Episys Ultimate System after careful consideration. The technology replaced the archaic labelling system that it had in place in its aseptic manufacturing unit. Richardson said, “The product will be used to label all of the manufactured items that come out of the unit. While piloting the product we were impressed with the flexibility of the technology. We also needed to obtain a product that could give us future growth capacity and Ultimate seemed to provided the best option for us.”

The aseptic unit purchased the whole Ultimate Labelling Package to give it greater robustness around the audit trail for manufacturing worksheet production.
The Ultimate system will give the hospital the benefits of having the worksheet module as an add-on to the basic labelling package. The worksheet module gives the aseptic unit the ability to amend existing worksheets quicker. Richardson added, “This gives us the enhanced benefits of having a full audit trail around any worksheet amendments that we produce within the cytotoxic unit. This is key in terms of our compliance with national cancer standards requirements. This technology will give us the ability to produce worksheets in a more slick and robust manner. A worksheet can be produced in a much shorter timeframe than was previously possible.”

New ideas

The Pharmacy department already has a barcode tracking system which enables it to track the drug chart prescriptions when they come down to pharmacy and in real-time it can log the journey of the drug chart through the dispensing process. These data are posted on the hospital’s intranet in “real time” and can be accessed by ward personnel to see at what stage of dispensing a particular medication has reached.”

The hospital has found several benefits in tracking patients’ drug charts in real-time. Richardson said, “The tracking system enables us to prove that our dispensing time frame was very short and it was actually the delivery time either to or from the pharmacy department which has actually delayed the discharge time. This has helped how the hospital manages and responds to possible complaints over delayed discharges.”

Episys’ experience in barcode technology has prompted the pharmacy department to explore utilising the technology in a couple of interesting ways. A ward based labelling initiative may enable the hospital to reduce risk on incorrect re-labelling of patients own medicines. Richardson said, “We felt there would be less labelling errors if we could re-label products at the ward level with the medicines fully in view with the patient and the prescription drug. We had been impressed with the flexibility of the product and we needed technology that could give us future growth capacity; Ultimate provided us with that option. Richardson said, “The printers have Wi-Fi capability which will enable us to tap into the existing pharmacy labelling main frame system. This means medicines can be relabelled at the ward. This should mean there is more rapid discharge of the patient from the ward because medicines are assembled at the ward level rather than the delay in transit to or in processing at the dispensary.”

Richardson also explained a second conceptual project, “This ties in with the NPSA initiative of having patient wristbands with barcode identifiers. It doesn’t seem a great leap of faith to be able to tie in the patient wristband barcode together with a barcode identifier on the patient’s drug chart. This would help at the time of drug administration nursing personnel can check over the patient wristband and the drug chart to confirm they have both the correct patient and correct medication prior to administering the medicine to the patient.

Future
One initiative that the hospital is looking at is to install barcode scanners in the pharmacy store which will enable better shelf location storage information and possible pending expiry date prompts.