First select your nurse

We’ve been having fun with our nurse prescribing computer software this week. We couldn’t understand why when we selected a particular nurse’s name and purple prescription form that we always seemed to get the computer assuming it was for a community practitioner nurse prescribing from their restricted formulary (hence most items were coming up as blacklisted!).

Then we discovered under ‘precriber details’ on the computer that we had to select either independent prescriber, community practitioner nurse prescriber, or supplementary prescriber (we had assumed that the system would do this for us when we selected the correct precriber’s name).

I also discovered that the dispensary staff didn’t really appreciate the differences between the three categories of nurse prescriber so we killed two birds with one stone by finding out how to correctly enter a nurse prescriber onto the computer and ensuring that the staff really understood the differences between the types of nurse prescriber.