The Scottish Digital Prescribing and Dispensing Programme

The Scottish Digital Prescribing and Dispensing Programme, is being led by Ewan Morrison, Director of Pharmacy, NSS and Dr Sam Patel, consultant physician in Respiratory and General Medicine NHS Lanarkshire, and eHealth Clinical Lead for NES Digital Services. This programme is a major national collaboration between  NHS Education for Scotland and NHS National Services Scotland, and aims to revolutionize the way we prescribe and dispense medications in Scotland, which is currently a paper-based process with some electronic elements, involving medical and non-medical prescribers, patients and pharmacists, generating around 5 million items a month.

In one of our previous episodes, we discussed the outputs of a series of NSS workshops held in 2019 looking at processes around prescribing. The findings acknowledged that ePrescribing is one of the key requirements to improve prescribing and dispensing processes. In this episode, Ewan and Sam discuss the outcome of phase 1 of this programme, which aims to find a technical and organisational electronic solution to meet the needs of NHS Scotland in the future, and has produced a paper prototype to inform this.

“Once we have removed the paper prescription, and replaced the wet signature, from in-hours GP prescribing, to community pharmacy, and the process works for everyone in that chain, including the patients, the citizen, that’s when we’ll be cracking open the Champagne”.

They will also be leading a plenary session at our November conference and you can hear more about the programme and ask them your own questions by registering below.

The SNUG Virtual Conference November 2021 agenda and booking details

NHS Digital EPS prescribing System Specification (specification for EPS in NHS England)