News Article
16 June 2009
NHS Prescription Services has made changes to ePACT to help you monitor the prescribing of special order items (‘specials’). We have increased the number of products covered by the ‘Liquid Specials’ tag in ePACT to include creams, ointments, tablets and so on. We’ve changed the name of the ‘Liquid Specials’ tag to ‘Special order products’ to reflect the new presentations which we have included. ePACT users will see the new tag name in ePACT from June 2009 for April’s prescribing data.
We’ve made these changes because of feedback we’ve had from ePACT users. Users said that they would like to be able to monitor products supplied as ‘specials’ more closely. Monitoring these products could provide potential savings to prescribing budgets.
The new tag is not a comprehensive list of all special order items and prescribing for items which dispensers have endorsed as DNG (‘discount not given’) will still be reported under the DND unspecified code. NHS Prescription Services is aware of the importance this type of prescribing can have on budgets. We are working to identify additional specials to include in the drug database so they are recorded under the specific names rather than the unspecified category.
The tag on ePACT is a blind tag. Users can see a full list of products included by using the snapshot function in ePACT when running a specials report.