Distec and Howard Medical: side by side at medical summit.
The Monitoring & Reducing Medication Errors & Harm in Hospitals National Summit 2018 is coming up in December in Manchester.
It’s a long name – but a simple cause. An estimated 237 million medication errors occur in the NHS each year, according to research by the University of York, and Former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced in March of this year that ‘we are seeing four to five deaths every single day because of errors in prescribing or dispensing or the monitoring of medications’.
The Summit, then, in line with the WHO Medication without Harm programme, ‘aims to bring together clinicians, managers, medication safety officers and leads to understand current national developments, and to debate and discuss key issues and areas they are facing in improving and monitoring medication safety, and reducing medication errors and harm in hospitals’.
We are very proud to announce that we will be exhibiting at the Summit alongside Howard Medical, the US healthcare technology giant, with whom we recently agreed an exclusive partnership.
Howard Medical manufactures high-quality medical POC carts which are used to ease workloads for nurses and other healthcare professionals, boosting efficiency and enhancing patient care. By enabling digital initiatives such as Electronic Medical Records (EMR), these carts reduce errors caused by cumbersome paperwork and manually importing and consolidating data from different sources. As such, they are a key piece of the puzzle in the drive towards both a paperless NHS and the reduction of medical errors that forms the focus of this Summit.
Eric Smolin, International Business Development Executive for Howard Medical will also be speaking at the event during the pre-conference supplier showcase. This hands-on aspect of the Summit will focus on how technology can tangibly transform medication and delivery and reduction of medication errors, by streamlining processes, removing manual tasks and introducing automation, and creating centralised, consolidated information sources rather than leaving medical practitioners to manually share information between multiple different systems.
Eric will discuss the impact that medication errors can have on workflow and how the US market in particular has benefitted from the ePMA – the end-to-end e-prescribing and medicines administration. This allows prescribers to transmit prescriptions electronically to the dispenser – usually a pharmacy – thereby reducing manual errors and speeding up processes. It is a key part of the NHS’s ‘Paperless 2020’ initiative. By presenting Howard Medical’s findings and solutions from the projects the company has been involved with in the US, Eric will help attendees at the Summit to explore how those learnings can best be applied in the UK context.
We are very proud to be exhibiting alongside Howard Medical and showcasing how our partnership can help improve accuracy, speed up processes and ultimately enhance patient care within UK hospitals – and we hope to see many of you there!
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