EPS- IMPACT: Improving Medicine Prescribing Amongst Community Teams (2025)

Midlands Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust

Project summary

Electronic Prescribing Service (EPS) has been successful in primary care for 20 years and Midlands Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (MPFT) in collaboration with NHS England and CLEO Systems, successfully deployed EPS as a first of type to secondary care, digitising paper processes of sending prescriptions to pharmacies. Before EPS, secondary care prescribers were handwriting FP10 prescriptions, posting or delivering them, or patients were often having to travel to collect. Now prescriptions are sent electronically to the patients nominated community pharmacy like primary care, enabling sustainability, reducing carbon footprint from delivery, increasing patient safety, and releasing clinic capacity for patient centred care.

MPFT serves a population of 1.5 million delivering clinical services across England, covering an area of 2400 square miles; from Staffordshire to the Isle of Wight. The number of patient appointments in MPFT from 2018 to 2023 has increased by approx. 20% and prescribers have fed back on increasing workloads; having the ability to send prescriptions electronically will help streamline the processes of requests and collections of prescriptions. Prescribers recognised that existing processes lacked standardisation, resulting in inefficiencies, wasting valuable time and resources. Patients would either attend site to collect prescriptions, have them posted or staff had to make trips for drop-offs and medication collections. Handwritten prescriptions introduced safety risks such as handwriting illegibility that could result in incorrect or delayed medication, which had the potential to trigger relapses or the emergence of symptoms in certain patients. EPS has provided benefits to our prescriber through around 8000 miles avoided in unnecessary travel (over 2300kg Co2) and 1 hour per week per prescriber in time saving using a digital system. Feedback from one patient included “Happier I don’t have to pick up from base and can go straight to pharmacy”. EPS has also avoided the ordering of over 3900 paper pads, and 132 days of admin processing and recording time and 274kg Co2 associated with paper.

EPS has removed the risks of illegibility, which could result in the wrong medication being dispensed, and delays, whilst the pharmacy checked with the prescriber what they had prescribed. It has also removed sustainability issues and problems relating to lost or stolen prescriptions, resulting in additional processing, postage, delivery time, and costs to cancel and reissue. There has been an 81% annual reduction in incidents relating to lost, stolen or illegally of prescriptions.