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A team of pharmacists and nurses have won national recognition for their work in developing a new system of prescribing medicine designed to relieve doctors’ workloads.
The pharmacy department and nutrition support team at Southampton University Hospitals Trust (SUHT) have been honoured with this year’s GlaxoSmithKline Advanced Practitioner Award.
They introduced a scheme at the city’s teaching hospitals that allows members of staff other than doctors to prescribe medication, freeing the doctors up to carry out other essential tasks.
The practice allows the nutrition support team to prescribe special feeds that are administered directly into a vein for patients unable to feed normally.
This was previously restricted simply to doctors, but is now also carried out by pharmacist and nurse prescribers in conjunction with the doctors.
More than 30 pharmacists and nurses now prescribe across the rust for acutely unwell patients as well as those with longer-term needs.
Peter Austin, senior pharmacist at SUHT, said: “We are extremely pleased to have had our achievements recognised by the industry. It is a measure of how rapidly we are moving forward in the development of non-medical prescribing in Southampton.”
The team will collect the award at a ceremony in Leicestershire on 21 November.
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Southampton University Hospitals Trust
