Helen Salisbury: Electronic prescribing in hospitals is well overdue

When I started in general practice we’d already made the switch to an electronic patient record. We still pulled the paper notes before each surgery—even though the chances of finding a relevant previous entry and being able to read the handwriting were slim—and laboratory results arrived on slips of paper to be stuck in the notes. These were soon replaced by electronic messages, which arrived more quickly and were less likely to be lost. The last element to go paperless was prescribing: even seven years ago I was still signing stacks of paper prescriptions, ready to be collected by the patient or the pharmacy. Although we can still …