Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure patients receive time-critical medication in care settings.

Hospital providers are responsible for ensuring that patients within hospital settings receive the appropriate medication on time, and there is a variety of different mechanisms that can be used to support timely administration.

These include:

• Training on time critical medications, which is part of the delivery of safe and effective medicines optimisation through the operation of each organisation’s Medicines Policy.
• Electronic prescribing and medicines administration, which continues to be rolled out in the National Health Service in England. This is recognised to be essential to record compliance with time critical medications.
• Self-administration may help some patients, following a shared risk assessment and where providers have the space and facilities to offer patients personalised secure storage for their medicines and there is facility to monitor when doses have been taken independently.

Furthermore, NHS England is leading the Medicines Safety Improvement Programme, as part of the wider NHS Patient Safety Strategy. A focus on time critical medicines has been agreed as a priority for this programme and work is underway involving 80 NHS trusts, with 48 of them receiving active support for innovation and improvement.