The UK’s NHS is under continuous pressure to allocate over two million prescription items per working day. Mistakes can easily be made and recent figures from the General Medical Council have shown that one in ten hospital prescriptions contain errors that could harm patients.
When designing and producing prescription labels, there are key elements which must be considered.
- MHRA compliance – For any prescription label, the correct information is vital to ensure patient wellbeing. Required information includes prescribed dose, route and frequency to be administered as well possible classification symbols/ pictograms, language requirements and supplemental information.
- Secure production – With prescription labels, accuracy is crucial. The healthcare professional administering the medication is accountable for their actions. If this role is delegated, the primary professional is responsible for all aspects of the administration, therefore controlling label production with individual user rights is essential to enable complete confidence during and post production.
- Ability to reprint and reconcile – Reprinting of printed labels needs to be quick and easy, however the reconciliation is fundamental. The ability to be able to track any reprints required for prescription labeling in an audit log against the original record is vital.
Why Patient Specific Direction?
One of the ways to combat these issues is via Patient Specific Direction (PSD). PSD is a written instruction for medicines to be supplied and/ or administered to a named patient. The prescription need to be instructed by a qualified and registered prescriber and include prescribed dose, route and frequency to be supplied or administered to a named patient. These can be instructions written in the patient’s notes, or a note sent to a treatment room for the administration of a medicine or a course of medicine. The treatment and administration should be documented and auditable.
The Solution – Painless Patient Specific Directions Labeling
To help support healthcare organizations, PRISYM ID has developed an off-the-shelf, ready labeling solution.
PRISYM Pharmacy allows you to design, review, approve, print, reprint and reconcile your labels and has purpose built user security, group security and secure audit logging as well as data integrity. It can also simply link to ERP and MRP systems to ensure that information from production can be delivered to the label at time of print.
For more information on how we can support you, please contact us.
Tags: healthcare, Labeling Regulations
