University Hospitals Dorset (UHD) Medicines Management Technician Katy George has been using the Dorset Care Record for the past two years, after hearing of its benefits from colleagues.
Complementing the role of hospital pharmacists, Katy is involved in supplying medication to patients while they are in hospital, in preparation for their discharge; counselling patients on their past and current medication; carrying out technical checks and liaising with members of the multidisciplinary team to ensure a safe and efficient service.
Katy uses the DCR hundreds of times a month to complete medicine reconciliation and drug histories of patients, updating medicines data from GPs and discharge letters.
“I really like the DCR as it contains so much more information including discharge summaries and GP encounters. When patients come in for their appointments I have information from the district nurses, such as – for example – doses of insulin.
“It does save time, but I love that the DCR is so up to date, and I really like how easy it is to use with our Electronic Patient Record (EPR). With other systems you can get confused with different patients but using DCR through our EPR means I am already in the patient’s record.”
Katy said the system allow the patients to get the right medication at the right time in a safe and secure way: “Pretty much 95% of my colleagues use it now – it’s really useful to have all the medication information to hand as some of our elderly patients sometimes forget the drugs they are taking.”
Among her hopes for the DCR for the future are the development of interoperability across the Wessex region, to include Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.
“I see many patients a day of which most are from Dorset but generally 1 in 10 are from Hampshire and it would be great to have that additional information available,” she said.
Plans for joining up the Hampshire Care and Health Information Exchange (CHIE) care record with the DCR are being coordinated by our sister shared care record system, Wessex Care Records and are advancing well and we hope will be available next year. Work in the meantime is also ongoing with the Ringwood and Coastal GP practice around New Milton to ensure Hampshire GPs can share information with University Hospitals Dorset.
Katy also highlighted that several pharmacists had mentioned the GP record of medications is ordered by the start date of the drugs within the DCR rather than the last issue date, adding that the Summary Care Record is ordered the other way round.
The One Medication Record – a further piece of work being led by the Wessex Care Records team – will resolve this issue over the next year.
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