Croydon becomes second ETP site

A pharmacy in south London and a primary care outreach centre for refugees have jointly become the second site to go live with Connecting for Health’s electronic transmission of prescriptions (ETP) project.

Brigstock Pharmacy in Croydon shares the same site with the Rainbow Medical Centre for refugees and the pharmacy has so far processed between 15 and 20 prescriptions using the national ETP system. 

The main surgery uses EMIS and Patel said another reason for choosing his site was that when the main surgery joins the scheme there will be two separate GP systems coming in to the pharmacy.

As part of the implementation the Rainbow Medical Centre for refugees became the first practice in England to go live with the ETP module of In Practice Systems’ Vision practice clinical software.   

Baren Patel, owner of the pharmacy, told EHI Primary Care that problems registering GPs for access to ETP as well as training delays had slowed down the initial set up and number of prescriptions processed so far but he hopes that more prescriptions will now start to come through.

Patel added: “Two more locums are getting signed up to use the system. The idea was to start by testing the system out on a small site like the outreach centre and when the hiccups have been sorted out we will move on to the main surgery which has 15,000 patients.”

Patel said that Brigstock Pharmacy and Rainbow Medical Centre had been chosen to test the national ETP service because the pharmacy and surgeries were on the same site and any difficulties could be easily handled by walking round to sort out queries in person.

He added: “ETP has made it easier to enter data on the computer. Now I can just do one click to say that the prescription is right and put it into the records. It hasn’t really made any difference on the dispensing side but I think its going to be good ultimately when we don’t need the paper based system.”

The pharmacy uses the AAH system Link Evolution and Patel has invested in new equipment to enable ETP to work. Patel said the expected start date for the main surgery was a couple of months away.

He added: “The GPs are quite looking forward to it because I think it will make things easier for them.”