Part of 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:57 pm on 19 September 2018.
I think it would be foolish to try and pause MTeD and try to do something different. If you look at what we've done, it's part of the Welsh clinical portal. Practitioners generally are very supportive of it and positive about it—not just practitioners within hospitals and GPs but also within the pharmacy world too—and there's recognition that we are in a better position than England, where they're trying to roll out something with similar functionality, and, in Scotland, whilst they have some tools for electronic discharge, they still have a largely paper-based system. So, I think we need to get on to roll out something that is consistent and then understand how we could develop and improve that in the future, and I have greater ambition still for improving the discharge process from hospital, making greater use of electronic prescribing and sharing of information across our health system and, in particular, to see what more community pharmacy can do to help improve transferring information and people out of hospital to make sure that their medicines are ready for them upon discharge in their own setting.