Dr Jo Taylor, Dorset County Hospital, Renal Unit Case Study

The Dorset Care Record will provide accurate medicine details about kidney patients who have in the past often brought inaccurate medical information to outpatient clinics.

This will eliminate the need for physicians to spend valuable time contacting the patient’s GP during clinics to get the information and reduce the opportunity of clinical error.

Dr Jo Taylor, consultant nephrologist at Dorset County Hospital’s renal unit, has with colleagues been looking at ways to address prescription discrepancies in renal patients across Dorset and south Somerset.

Chronic renal failure is a condition often necessitating complex medication regimes to manage patients with hypertension, hyperlipidaemia, diabetes, anaemia and acidosis.

Concerned about the number of patients bringing inadequate information about medications, Dr Taylor looked at the rate of discrepancies between the recorded list of medications in the patients notes and the patient’s current prescription.

‘Too often the patient came to the clinic without the necessary information, meaning that I needed to contact the GP, often to find that the records were completely at odds with what the patient was saying.’

Changes to the appointment letter emphasising the need for patients to bring prescription information has already led to the proportion of patients attending renal outpatient clinics forgetting their drug list falling over a three year period from 10.5% in 2014 to just 3.9% last year.

The expectation is that the Dorset Care Record will help physicians more easily manage those remaining patients that fail to bring accurate medicine information to clinic.

‘The intervention used in the quality improvement project can potentially improve prescribing safely in an outpatient setting: ‘The Dorset Care Record will provide accurate details about medications that have been prescribed,’ she added.