Providing a reliable set of printers may not sound like the most exciting of IT developments but for GP practices who rely on printers for producing prescriptions, having a dependable service is not only important, it is crucial for patient care.
We spoke to Penybryn surgery practice manager, Paul Littlejohns, who has been part of the pilot for the managed print service. The small surgery in Gorseinon in Swansea, who have under 5000 patients on their books, may not be the biggest user of printers, however, even for a modest sized practice they still print over 2000 prescriptions per month.
As Paul told us “We had lots of problems with the old style printers, I would spend numerous hours a week trying to fix them. We’d have printer jams, paper jams, cartridges not working at least two or three times a week.” This was obviously not the best use of his time as practice manager and when there was a patient waiting for their prescription it impacted time for the doctors too.
However, this has all changed since the managed print service started, as he explained “The new printers seem to be more efficient, I don’t have to spend any time fixing them. We also get new cartridges sent in the post, we don’t know we are running short but the system does. So there is no downtime for our printers. Having this automating is a bonus”
On top of the prescription printing, they frequently also need to print insurance reports. “These reports can be 50 to 100 pages long, and we get three or four of these a week” Paul highlighted.
He finished by saying “We need an efficient printing service and I believe that this is what we have got now”.
The results from the pilot have proved to be positive, and the roll out across Wales will be commencing later in the year.