Troops preparing to deploy overseas are being wrongly prescribed damaging anti-malarial drugs due to failures in the Ministry of Defence’s medical IT system, senior army doctors have warned.
Medics are frequently unable to access soldiers’ patient histories and end up handing out inappropriate drugs such as lariam, or prescribing medicines meant for other patients, according to the former head of Britain’s main military hospital in Afghanistan.
Colonel Glynn Evans said yesterday the Defence Medical Information Capability Programme (DMICP) made it impossible to provide safe and timely treatment to armed forces members and their families.
He warned the slow pace of the software means military doctors are unable to follow the strict criteria for choosing certain drugs in the rushed hours before a deployment.
The Army apologised last year for ignoring precautions for prescribing lariam in the case of thousands of troops.
The drug has been shown to cause depression, suicidal thoughts and psychosis.
The British Medical Association yesterday called on the MoD to urgently improve the system to prevent its “frequent software crashes or total loss of IT”.
Chair of the body’s Armed Forces Committee and an NHS anaesthetist, Colonel Evans said: “We’re having to treat real patients in real time and the system cannot keep up with us.”
“Even to print a prescription – it has to go such a convoluted route that it can take 30 minutes to come out, maybe from a…