Changing the Drug or Dosage of a Prescription

Purpose

For scenarios where a patient's medication regime changes over time, for example their drug or dosage needs to be adjusted, you can use the 'change drug/dosage' feature outlined in this guide.

Navigating to the care record

There are two ways to navigate to the patient record within Medicus:

1. Using the patient finder.
2. By selecting a patient from the patient list, located in the Patient Administration module.

Once you select the patient you'd like to view through one of the methods outlined above, you'll be taken to the clinical care record.

Changing the drug or dosage of a prescription 

To change the drug or dosage of a prescription, click on the prescription you would like to change from the patient record.

This will open up the 'View Prescription' screen. From here, select 'Change drug/dosage'.

This will open up the 'Change Drug/Dosage' form.

You're informed at the top of the form that a new prescription will be created and the current prescription will appear in Medicus as discontinued.

Once you've amended the fields you'd like to amend, you can either issue now or issue later.

Note: if any of the issues were issued via EPS then Medicus needs to try get these back from EPS.

Changing the drug or dosage of a repeat dispensing prescription

Changing the drug or dosage of a repeat dispensing prescription is slightly more complicated as there are multiple issues that the status needs to be identified for and cancelled.

If the repeat dispensing prescription was not issued via EPS then the workflow is simple and will follow as if it were any other prescription.

However, if the prescription was issued via EPS then Medicus will need to try get any issues back from EPS that haven't been dispensed yet.

Note: you'll need to be logged in with your Smartcard if the prescription was issued via EPS.

Medicus will request to cancel via EPS any issues which haven't been dispensed yet.

If any issues are with the dispenser or have already been dispensed to the patient, you'll be notified of this in Medicus and may have to contact either the pharmacy or the patient.

Complete EPS Cancellation Task

When requesting a cancellation of an EPS prescription, if the dispenser has already drawn the prescription from the Spine and therefore you need to contact the pharmacy, then Medicus will create a 'Complete EPS Cancellation' task to ensure the action isn't forgotten.

The task is under the 'Prescribing' section of the Workflow module and can be found under the task list of whoever actioned the original request.

Once you've followed the cancellation instructions on the task, select 'Mark as pharmacy contacted' to complete the task.