The Reality of Medication Audits in 2022

Our recent survey of pharmacy colleagues on their views about medication audits uncovered some great insights into the current challenges facing teams. As we expected, most audits are completed using manual methods, with the audit data transcribed into Excel for manual results analysis and senior level reporting.

To allow you to digest the statistics from our research, we have created an infographic capturing the fundamental elements:

The aim of our research was to begin to understand the scale and nature of manual activity happening against a backdrop of well documented staff shortages in the NHS, increasing pressure for process improvement and efficiency savings as well as a move to a digital NHS.  Based on conversations we have had with pharmacy leaders and front-line teams in the past year, we knew the figure would be high. Nevertheless, to discover that 71% of the sample organisations we spoke to are using paper to capture their medication audits was an eye-opener.

In addition to this, the fact that only 5% of people we spoke to felt that their audit process was effective emphasised the scale of the challenge.    

Often at events we overhear the conversations between technicians saying, ‘we need that’ and ‘this would make our lives so much easier.’ Changing a process can sometimes be hard, and at Drugs Audit we completely understand that. We also appreciate that with complex software implementations like ePMA there is a fear about resource and cost. Drugs Audit has been designed to be a low cost, low resource platform with a short implementation time.  Once it’s set up, the platform will reduce the amount of resource hours you dedicate to audits, leaving you and your team free to focus on patient facing care.