INPS have become aware of a potential issue with user created guidelines that specifically use a Drug Regime and where those guidelines have been imported (i.e. taken from one practice to another). Although INPS feel that the clinical risk is very small and it is unlikely that a practice will experience the issue we have reported the problem to the Connecting for Health Clinical Safety team. A description of the issue is provided below if you have any concerns please contact the service desk.
Brief outline of problem:
The Drug Regime for a guideline is an ordered collection of drug defaults that can be prescribed from a guideline, providing a prescribing protocol
The Drug Regime often consists of the same drug repeated for different dosages, from weakest to strongest, and may also include variations for infants, children or other age ranges.
Rather than listing a whole series of drugs from one or more Action Groups, the drug regime will show specially selected individual drugs with age filters which are relevant to a particular condition or for a particular purpose. These filters and individual drugs have to be manually set up by the clinician/user.
INPS have come across an issue with regards to re-importing such drug guidelines and then using the guideline to prescribe Acute/Therapy items. There are two parts to this bug and only part 2 is considered to be a clinical safety issue:
Read more about this issue here (Word document).
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