Four South trusts tender for ePMA

Four southern acute trusts have tendered for an electronic prescribing and medicines administration system worth £5m-£7m, backed by central funding.

The seven-year contract will see one ePMA system delivered to Salisbury, Poole Hospital and Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals NHS foundation trusts, and Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust.

The ePMA group is the fifth to go to tender from a total of six acute collaborations formed as part of the Southern Local Clinical Systems Programme, which was set up to support trusts that received nothing from the National Programme for IT.

Each of the four trusts in the collaborative will enter into separate contracts, with a total estimated value range of £5m-£7m, including support and maintenance.

Peter Gill, director of informatics at Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which is leading the tender process, said all four trusts had a similar vision of using ePMA to improve quality and safety.

“The intention is that there will be a closed loop, from the idea of prescribing occurring to a doctor to a drug entering somebody’s body, with all the information between these two points captured and auditable,” he said.

The tender says the new system must be able to integrate with existing pharmacy stock control systems as well as other clinical systems and include decision support.

Gill added that the trusts were now on a “fairly proscribed timetable” with the tender, which should see contracts signed in October this year. There will then be six months of preparation before they implement the new system in 2015-16.

“The only thing that is not clear is whether six months of pre-configuration and testing will be enough,” he said. “With ePMA, the big variable is configuration.

“With twenty or so trusts having ePMA in place [across the country], I would hope that we are over some of the issues encountered by the first trusts to do this, and that we will not all be starting from scratch.”

The government has approved more than £80m of central funding for the six acute groups in the Southern programme, which predates the Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards approach and technology funding, which have put a significant emphasis on e-prescribing.

The 23 trusts involved will also contribute more than £100m locally. There were seven trusts in the ePMA collaboration, but Southern Health, Royal Surrey County Hospital and University Hospitals Bristol NHS foundation trusts have left it for different reasons.

A Royal Surrey spokesperson said the trust withdrew because it decided that it needed to have a full IT review before proceeding to procurement.

A spokesperson for Southern Health said it had to pull out because the tender was for acute providers and as a mental health and community trust it was not eligible.