NHS Direct Wins Award For Communication Excellence, UK

Main Category: Public Health
Also Included In: Pediatrics / Children's Health
Article Date: 26 Jul 2008 - 0:00 PST

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NHS Direct is delighted to have won the 2008 Ask About Medicines Award for 'Excellence in improving communication between healthcare professionals and patients or medicine users' for the Evelina Children's Hospital pilot Information Prescription project.

During the pilot medicine prescriptions were used to trigger the offer of an information prescription from the Children's hospital and five community pharmacies across the country. Parents completed a simple tick-box information prescription request with the pharmacist. Parents could request information about their child's condition, support groups available, the medicines action, adverse effects, what to do if the child experiences adverse effects, what to do if they miss a dose and what to do if the condition deteriorates.

Requests were faxed or emailed to NHS Direct who then compiled information against the request and delivered it to parents via email or post, within 24-48 hours.

Anne Joshua, NHS Direct associate director of Pharmacy, said: "We are delighted to be winners for the second year running. The whole project was one of team work and partnership with Evelina Children's Hospital and the community pharmacies involved in the pilot. The project demonstrated an easy way for pharmacists to provide a personalised information prescription directly in the format of choice for parents caring for young children. The feedback from parents was that the service provided valuable support and reassurance about medicines at a time when sometimes there is too much information and it is difficult to find what is important for your child."

Background to the pilot

Little written information aimed at children, their parents or their carers, about use of medicines in children exists. The little information that does exist has often been developed in-house with no standardisation or quality assurance.

Legislation requires patient information leaflets (PILs) with every dispensed medicine, but these seldom relate to use of the medicine in children. Many medicines used in children are used outside of a product licence and this is particularly true in secondary care. This means that children and their carers often receive inappropriate information, for example the PIL refers to use of the medicine in adults; no information or even dangerous information (e.g. doses specified in the PIL are adult doses) about medicines that the child is to take.

Past and current projects have aimed to produce appropriate medicines information for children but as these have been mostly local examples, but there has never been a robust mechanism to centrally co-ordinate, review and update, and ensure consistency of that information is available to this vulnerable section of our population. The Department of Health has specified that accredited health and medicine information be available to patients by the end of 2008 (Information Prescriptions).

The Evelina Children's Hospital project was designed to start changing the situation of information deficit around information about medicines in children, and to test a system that could be used on a national basis.

Source:
Ann Grain
http://www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk