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Queen's Medical Centre Pharmacy IT Department, wins 2006 First DataBank Information Technology Award

15 March 2006

This year’s First DataBank Europe Guild of Healthcare Pharmacists Information Technology Award (GHP IT) has been awarded to the Pharmacy Department of Queen’s Medical Centre (QMC), Nottingham, it was announced today. Queen’s Medical Centre in collaboration with inNottingham web design, was commended for its development of a networked IT system to improve the on-call pharmacy service.

The annual award, which is in its fourth year, was set up to encourage, support and promote information technology initiatives and best practice in the use of IT in pharmacy. This year’s winning project is an IT system created to improve the monitoring and management of out-of-hours activity for on-call pharmacists.
The judges were impressed by the call logging system that records, disseminates and reports the on-call service and workloads. This is an improvement on the old paper-based method which could be misinterpreted, was time consuming and not user-friendly. This new paperless system actively targets next day follow up to ensure continuity of patient care and comes complete with a sophisticated reporting module giving the ability to interrogate the system for management information. The system sits on the hospital’s intranet and has a high degree of functionality allowing QMC to improve communication between pharmacists on call and those covering core hours at the hospital.

QMC will be formally presented with its award for £2,500 from First DataBank Europe at the GHP IT Interest Group Seminar in Coventry on 26th April. Please contact jean.fairhurst@ntlworld.com or 01727 750191 for an application form for the 2007 award.

Malcolm Partridge, Chief Pharmacist at QMC said: “This project has already been of tremendous value to the department in improving the confidence of the pharmacists and the service to patients. Winning the award is a great achievement for our team, and it will encourage us to develop the system to further improve the service we provide."

Neil Kirby, Chair of the Guild of Healthcare Pharmacists IT Interest Group, enthused: “We had a number of excellent submissions for this year’s award. However, we particularly liked the resourcefulness of this system. It clearly demonstrated best practice and collaboration with other trusts. This concept could easily be transferred to other hospital trusts throughout the UK."

Keith Kirtland, sales and marketing director at First DataBank Europe said: “We are delighted that this innovative project won the 2006 Award, and hope that the money will help QMC develop the system even further. We can confirm that we will be offering the Award again in 2007 and encourage departments or individuals to enter their projects and continue to share good practice with others."

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Contact Information
Carla Zumfelde, Marketing Manager
01392 440 106
carla_zumfelde@firstdatabank.co.uk

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