Community nurses to start e-prescribing pilot in 2006

Community nurses are to take part in NHS Connecting for Health pilots of electronic nurse prescribing early next year.

Barbara Stuttle, Connecting for Health’s clinical lead for community nurses, told EHI Primary Care that community staff such as district nurses and health visitors would be provided with laptops and handheld computers as part of the scheme.

She added: “The details have yet to be sorted out and eventually the idea is that the system will link nurses to the NHS Care Records Service through the spine but that won’t happen initially because the spine is not ready yet.”

In an exclusive interview with EHI Primary Care Stuttle set out her vision of how she believes community nurses and patients can gain from the National Programme for IT and her role in delivering the changes.

Stuttle, who is also chair of the Association of Nursing Prescribing and director of primary care and modernisation at Thurrock Primary Care Trust, is leading the project on IT support for nurse prescribing by community nurses.

She said IT would provide decision support for community nurses and mean that information about the prescribing carried out in patients’ home could be relayed immediately into GP systems.

She added: “IT is an added tool to ensure better practices in prescribing and if we’re asking clinicians to do something they should have the tools to do the job.”

A report commissioned by the Department of Health and published earlier this year included a survey of almost 250 nurse prescribers of which only 5% said they were able to prescribe using computer generated prescriptions.

Prescribing among practice nurses is expected to increase this year as the leading GP system suppliers introduce software to allow nurses access to computer-generated prescriptions in practices.

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Nurse prescribers lack access to computer systems