** Scotland & Northern Ireland Only ** - Problem Related to Patient Request for Acute Prescription Containing '&' and / or '<' Characters in Text

OneAdvanced has been made aware of an issue whereby when a patient requests an acute prescription via Vision Patient Facing Services and the text of the request includes an ampersand ‘&’ and/or '<' characters, the request cannot be marked with a status of "Filed", which in turn will prevent the patient being notified that the prescription has been issued.

The request message appears correctly in Vision Mail Manager, as per the example below for a prescription request for paracetamol & ibuprofen:

However, when attempted to be filed in Mail Manager, the message does not generate or display a yellow note reminder in Consultation Manager as expected. The following shows a yellow note that would be normally be displayed (crossed out in red to reflect that this would not be displayed as the text of the request included an ampersand ‘&’ character):

Additionally, a message with text that includes an ampersand ‘& and/or '<’ characters will be unable to be marked with a status of "Filed" in Mail Manager, which means that it will remain indefinitely with a status of "Available for filing":  

The usual process is that a message is marked with a status of "Filed" once the patient-requested prescription has been issued. This will trigger a notification to be sent to the patient that their prescription has been fulfilled and will be available for collection at their nominated pharmacy. However, as this process is not possible for these messages, the patient will be unaware that their prescription has been completed. As a result, there is a risk that this may lead to a delay in the patient obtaining the medication (the patient falsely believing it hasn’t been issued). There is also a risk that the practice believes the patient's prescription request has not been actioned and issues another prescription for the items. 

OneAdvanced is in the process of establishing a fix to permanently resolve this issue. In the meantime, to mitigate the above risks, the following note has been added to the Patient Services login (welcome) screen of all practices where Vision Patient Facing Services is enabled, to alert patients not to use special characters '&' and '<' in any electronic prescription requests made using this method:  

Please refrain from using special characters '&' or '<' when sending a message to the practice requesting prescriptions as this prevents the practice from processing your request in a timely fashion.  

As further mitigation, OneAdvanced would recommend that Vision practices with Patient Facing Services functionality enabled carry out the following additional actions: