Out-patient prescriptions

Out-patient prescription forms are specific to each hospital and contain the same type of information as an NHS prescription form. 

TTOs and out-patient prescription forms will include the following (see Section 2.2.7) ... 

TTOs and out-patient prescription forms will specify the patient s details, details of the medication to be supplied, the signature of the prescriber, the address of the prescriber, an indication of the prescriber type and an appropriate date. 

For out-patient prescriptions, it is the responsibility of the pharmacist to perform a clinical check on the prescription. This will follow the same stages that are followed when performing a clinical check on an NHS prescription (see Section 3.3.4). The main key difference is that the hospital pharmacy staff will not have access to the patient s patient medical record (PMR) as this is usually held on the computer of the patient s usual community pharmacy. Therefore, it will not usually be possible to check for interactions with previously prescribed medication. In summary, the following points need to be considered ... 

For TTOs and out-patient prescriptions, they will be dispensed and labelled as for NHS prescriptions in the community (see Section 3.3.5). Remember that the label(s) will be generated first followed by the item(s) being dispensed. 

This section contains examples of hospital medication orders (an in-patient order, a TTO and an out-patient prescription) for dispensing in a hospital pharmacy. 

Out-patient prescriptions check against any available information V /... 

This example is similar to Example 3.4 in Section 3.5.2, the difference being that instead of the item being prescribed by a GP on a standard FP10 NHS prescription form, the item has been prescribed as an out-patient prescription for a patient who has been seen by a consultant in an out-patient clinic. Note the differences between the dispensing process for this example and Example 3.4. 

You receive the following out-patient prescription in your pharmacy ... 

Endorse prescription Endorse the out-patient prescription with the details of the medication supplied and initials of the pharmacist and pharmacy technician(s) involved in the dispensing process. 

This chapter has covered the key points with which it is necessary to be familiar in order to supply medication to patients within a hospital setting. It is important that pharmacists and pharmacy technicians are familiar with the different types of hospital supply (in-patient orders, TTOs and out-patient prescriptions) and the new variants of these (for example, dispens-... 

Finally, it should be remembered that in many cases, different rules apply to what may be supplied via an in-patient medication order or TTO/out-patient prescription compared with NHS supply in primary care. The main difference between these types of supply and NHS supply (see Chapters 2 and 3) is that the Drug Tariff rules do not apply. 

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