The Ipswich and East Suffolk Alliance, part of Suffolk and North East Essex ICB, has 80 older adult care homes with a total population of around 3,500 beds.
We were given this project by the IT lead who went onto another role back in May 2021 but with all the information governance in place and My Care Records, our local information sharing agreement.
This project supports care homes to enable proxy access for online medication ordering for their residents. Once set up, care homes can log onto a portal and see all their residents on one screen, regardless of which practice they are registered with (all our practices are on the same clinical system) and have 24/7 oversight of prescription ordering and where a prescription is at any one time. They are also able to add shortfall requests via the same system.
A small team from the ICB works with the care home and GP practice to ensure care homes benefit optimally. Benefits include:
• High standards of information governance
• Medications thoroughly reviewed prior to going live – this has included training opportunities for PCN/Practice pharmacists & technicians from our Medicines Optimisation team
• Practice and care home trained together at set up meeting
• Improved relationships between practice and care home
• Better and safer care for patients as less room for error interpreting handwritten requests/transferring data
• Reduced prescribing
• Increased awareness of digital and IT solutions for care homes
• Reduced calls between care home and practice
In two years, we have enabled 44 (55%) of our older adult care homes to go live as well as a supported living provider with six home settings.
One testimonial from a care home manager was: “Proxy access for online medication ordering has been a God send. This has saved staff so much time, when ordering monthly medication or once only medication they can log on and see at what stage the prescription is at and if it has been sent to the pharmacy. This saves so much time we used to waste on chasing medication via phone calls whether it be monthly or once only. Also when ordering our monthly medication we would request what we needed but often we would get medication we have not ordered so now we only get what we have ordered so no over stock!!! The set up was easy and smooth and it is really easy to use. I would recommend this it saves so much time and takes away some much of the stress around the ordering and delivery of medication for your staff.”
