Views from Innovation Leads

Andrea Atkinson, Project Manager, Pharmacy Department - Royal Derby Hosptal 

"Here at DHFT we encourage the use of patients’ own medicines, where appropriate, during hospital stays, because of benefits to patient safety, patient experience and waste reduction. We, therefore, support the green medicine bag scheme, as it forms part of our overall plan to promote this.

For our elective patients, we offer green medicine bags to those attending pre-op clinics.  Within all our emergency and assessment areas, stocks are kept of the green medicine bags. If a patient, therefore, doesn’t bring in their medicines, we issue a bag to their relatives, friends or carers and ask them to use it for transporting in any medicines."

Cheryl Crocker, Deputy Director of Nursing of East Midlands Ambulance Service notes  

‘As the ambulance service can be the first and last point of contact for patients when they are conveyed to and from hospital, ambulance trusts play a pivotal part in medicines management, and in particular improving the safety of patients in relation to medicines reconciliation.

Using the Patient Medicine Bag means that ambulance crews know what medicines patients are taking and having all medicines together in one place reduces time on scene spent locating medicines.

This also helps with diagnosis and improves patient safety by reducing potential adverse drug interactions/reactions and means that this information can easily be passed on to other health care professionals.

Returning home with a Patient Medicine Bag also means crews can ensure each patient has the correct medicines and reinforce the importance of storing these safely’.

Gemma George, Specialist Clinical Pharmacist - Emergency Department, Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust 

“At NUH we are highly committed to ensuring that we deliver high quality care safely, consistently and productively to our patients.  At NUH we believe that through the adoption of the Patient Medicine Bag scheme, patient care will be improved through effective medicines reconciliation.  It is our intention to support this innovative idea and help move the adoption of the Patient Medicine Bag scheme forward.” 

Sharon Wright, Head of Governance - NHS Northamptonshire

"NHS Northamptonshire is committed to considering implementing the Patient Medicine Bag approach to reducing  costs and medication errors across the community beds within Northamptonshire. We will be meeting with our pharmacy services manager and EMAS (Northamptonshire)  to discuss an implementation plan."