Before you prescribe or administer medications to outpatients

You can add information to the top banner about your patient. For example, the patient's allergies, height, and weight.

Your organisation decides what details you must provide before you can prescribe and administer medication.

If you prescribe a medication, then add an allergy to that medication, you can still administer the medication. You view allergy information when administering. This is different to EPMA for inpatients, where the medication must be reviewed before you can administer the medication.

Preparing to prescribe and administer medications to outpatients on a mobile

You can’t prescribe medications to outpatients on a mobile.

Preparing to prescribe and administer medications to outpatients on a desktop

You can view the top banner from  Outpatients > Clinic List > double-click on a patient's name > Patient Detail > Meds.

The top banner contains information about the patient. Your organisation decides what to show, but in outpatients the top banner usually includes allergy details, and height and weight. In our standard product, the information in the top banner is not mandatory, but it depends on your organisation.

Above the top banner is the patient banner. The patient banner for outpatients in light blue. The patient banner for inpatients is dark blue.

Your organisation can configure the top banner for outpatients separately from the top banner for inpatients. The top banners might contain different information.

Read more about top banner for inpatients

For safe prescribing and administration, you must complete mandatory fields before you can prescribe. Your organisation decides which fields are mandatory.

  1. Select any field from the top banner.

  2. Mandatory fields are marked .

In the exceptional circumstance that you can't complete mandatory fields before prescribing, for example, during an anaphylactic reaction, you can temporarily override this requirement. This temporary override allows you to prescribe multiple medications. All information is auditable.

  1. Select Override and enter a reason.

  2. When you leave Meds, the banner reinstates the mandatory fields.

  1. From Meds, select Allergies.

  2. Select Search / Add, and enter the allergy in the search box.

    You can enter up to 40 characters. You can search using the first three letters of your search term.

    The allergy field is a SNOMED CT Systematised Nomenclature of Medicine (Clinical Terms). Provides the clinical language that facilitates electronic communication between healthcare professionals in clear and unambiguous terms, and can be used to code, retrieve and analyse clinical data. clinical note. The search returns all allergies in the SNOMED CT database that match.

    Read more about the SNOMED CT clinical note

    If you can't find an allergy, speak to your pharmacist.

    Read more about entering allergies that don't appear in SNOMED CT

  1. Optional: select Append Comment to add supporting comments.

  2. Optional: complete any additional fields.

    Additional fields might include the type and severity of the allergy.

  3. Select Save to continue.

    The allergy and supporting comments are shown in the top banner.

    Selecting allergies removes ‘no known allergy’.

If you can’t find an allergy, speak to your pharmacist.

  1. From Meds, select Allergies.

  2. Select Search / Add, and enter the allergy in the search box.

    You can enter up to 40 characters.

    If you can't find a medication allergy in the SNOMED CT database, enter ‘Drug allergy’, ‘Drug intolerance’, or ‘food allergy’ in the search box.

  3. Select Append Comment to enter further details about the allergy or intolerance.

    When you sign a prescription, allergies entered this way appear as a ‘Possible allergy’ alert.

  1. From Meds, select Allergies.

  2. If a patient has no allergies, you can select Set No known allergy.

    Selecting ‘no known allergy’ removes any allergies previously entered.

From  Outpatients, you don’t need to verify allergies before prescribing and administering medications.

When you prescribe a medication that a patient is allergic to, an alert appears to warn you.

The height and weight of the patient are shown in the top banner.

To record height and weight in the top banner:

  1. From Meds, select Height and Weight in the top banner.

  2. Enter the height and weight.

    Nervecentre automatically calculates BMI .

  3. Select Next.

  4. Add comments, as necessary. Select Submit.

    Height, weight, and BMI are shown in the top banner.

Note: If the height and weight are recorded in another part of Nervecentre, the recorded values populate, or update, the top banner. For example: 

  • For outpatients, you can record height and weight in the observations summary from Clinical on a desktop.

  • For inpatients, you can record height and weight in observations on the mobile app.