What’s it all about? Part 1

We are so proud of Drugs Audit! Our platform is helping NHS hospital pharmacy teams take a huge step closer to becoming fully digital.

Why Drugs Audit?

Before Drugs Audit the challenges facing clinical pharmacy teams were significant. Audits were often completed manually using paper. This was a slow process with frequent inaccuracies that required additional follow up, sometimes even leading to the need for another audit to be completed. The time and effort wasted was immeasurable, and the team at London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust felt that enough was enough.

Drugs Audit Rules

Controlled Drugs audits, among others, are a key part of any clinical pharmacist's role. They are carried out regularly throughout the year, as required by the Department of Health.

They are statutory and essential, but time-consuming on a large scale! Significant amounts of time are spent doing administration tasks, inputting and analysing data. Even after all this effort, the results aren’t always accurate.

The other challenge is that while there is guidance on the management of controlled drugs, each trust will have a different process, a different interpretation of the guidelines and as a result no trust has a standard format. This leads to wide variation among audits and no way to compare how you are performing against others. While this may not be important at a hospital level, for the wider pharmacy community this information could provide useful insight.

How is Drugs Audit changing the process?

Drugs Audit has revolutionised the process of auditing controlled drugs and medication in acute trusts. By identifying the core pain points and opportunities for better information, the team have successfully defined new ways of working, changed their pace of process and provided the granularity, automation, and robustness that other electronic solutions didn’t.

Through collaboration with a number of NHS Trusts, the Drugs Audit team has identified and addressed the main barriers to effective medication audit digitisation across UK Healthcare and created templates for a wide range of medication audits that were causing challenges every day. One of the pharmacists who was part of the initial prototype gave us their thoughts on the manual process:

“If it says you should have 28 morphine and you don’t, then that’s an issue. So we’d have to report it, and investigate it. You have to contact the person who filled out the form, so you’re almost educating them post-audit to do actions they should have done at the time.

“Another issue is the constant chasing of people. If you have 150 audits and 84 had come back, how do you know which area hasn’t been done? Who do you chase? This solution solves that issue instantly!

- Chief Pharmacist, London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust

This challenge is not unique by any means, as clinical pharmacists across the UK are facing this challenge daily! This is where Drugs Audit can quickly change internal process with minimal training and virtually zero IT requirement (besides internet connection). We will, within the first quarter of working with us, remove the vast majority of challenges and barriers to compliance instantly.

Join us next Wednesday for Part 2 of the ‘What’s it all about…?’ blog

In the meantime, why not Book a Demo using the button below? 30 minutes of your time could save you and your team hundreds of hours in future!

See you next time…….

Helen from Team Drugs Audit!