Guidance – Search and Prescribe
Introduction
The
Design Guidance – Search and Prescribe document provides you with
guidance and recommendations for the design of solutions whose aim is to support
searching for and prescribing individual medications for single patients. It describes
the area of focus, lists mandatory and recommended guidance points with usage examples
and explains the rationale behind the guidance. This work describes a Prescribing
Model that is designed to minimize the risk when prescribing (or ‘ordering’)
medications in hospital and acute care. It advocates a dose-based prescribing system in which:
- A prescriber specifies a drug by its generic name plus dose, route and frequency
- A nurse then selects the correct quantity of an actual product to give to the patient
The Prescribing Model aims to provide the safeguards needed to ensure dose-based
prescribing results in prescriptions without any unsafe ambiguities for those giving
medicines to patients.