Describing How Practice Staff are Using Release 2 of The Electronic Prescription Service

I'm Sharon Phillips, I'm a nurse practitioner, I'm also a nurse prescriber and I also manage the practice and I work at Brownhill Surgery. We've been using EPS version two for about the last six months; prior to that we were already doing repeat dispensing. I think if you want some tips to be organised to be able to do this smoothly, it's to get a lot of your patients synchronised get most medications synchronised. Get the medication review dates running alongside when you do actually want to see the patient for any, sort of, review that is due, any chronic disease follow ups for example. And also, the authorisations of how many prescriptions they're allowed get them all running together, so the whole thing is synchronised. You'll find that the actual transition to doing repeat dispensing, and then into EPS version two will be a lot easier. I think you also need to look at the actual process that you have in your practice for generating the prescriptions, it may well be you have admin staff doing a lot of the generation of repeat prescribing, but who actually deals with any acute requests and who deals with any queries. Because what we found initially, we have two nurse prescribers in our practice so a lot of the acute requests or queries go through to the nurses, who deal with the query, but they don't actually sign the prescription, they just generate the prescription, and we also have somebody in admin who may be generating a repeat prescription, so it then became confusing because we had two parts of the prescription, that could be in different bits of the building. So we actually had to backtrack, in the system that we were doing, if there were any query or anything on a prescription then it was only ever dealt with by one person; so that is just something to think about depending on what system you currently run in your own practice.