Health bosses aim to reduce medication wait times for Parkinson's patients across the Northumbria NHS Trust.
The move comes as the service aims to improve on medication errors across the service. A total of 80% of Parkinson's patients are given their medication within 30 minutes, but the NHS Trust wants to increase that to 95% and eliminate waiting times beyond one hour.
According to the NHS, Parkinson's disease is a condition in which parts of the brain become progressively damaged over many years. Symptoms include tremors, slow movements and stiff inflexible muscles.
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People living with the condition can also experience psychological symptoms including depression, anxiety, balancing issues and memory problems.
Rachel Carter, safety director of Northumbria Healthcare NHS Trust said: "The reason we have chosen this area, this is from an acute perspective, we have got a number of work streams that feed into our safer medication practice group including things like high-risk medication such as end-of-life meds or insulin. The Parkinson's team are doing a really good job of looking at improvements but they do not have assistance from an improvement team.
"They are doing it on top of their day jobs. We don't have the data in real-time as to how many Parkinson's patients we have in our hospitals at any one time.
"What we do have is Triscribe and we are working on building on that. It allows us to see how many missed dosages we have.
"That is significant because the timing for Parkinson's meds is really critical. Ideally, you want within 15 minutes or 30 minutes of your administration time to administer dosages.
"It makes such a big difference to the patients it allows them to function, allows them to swallow their medication, food and drink.
"Working with a Parkinson's consultant we are now thinking about how to reduce the number of delay dosages and we are aiming to deliver 95% of dosages given in 30 minutes."
The Parkinson's effort forms a larger part of the NHS Trust's efforts to improve and reduce medication errors. Over the previous years according to Ms Carter, several high-risk medication incidents were logged with the trust's district nurses.
Ms Carter said the recorded problems were now being treated as a learning opportunity and a chance to collect data. No major incidents were recorded.
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