Advance patient safety with the right prescription. First time.
On 20 April 2026, the Joint Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) and Neonatal and Paediatric Pharmacy Group (NPPG) Medicines Committee published a position statement titled Safe and effective dose management in electronic prescribing and medicines administration systems. The Pharmaceutical Journal has since covered the publication under the headline National formulary should be integrated into electronic prescribing, paediatric bodies say.
For the first time, paediatrics has a national specification for what safe dose management inside electronic prescribing and medicines administration (EPMA) systems should look like. The committee's recommendations are precise:
The committee's review, four years on from the Healthcare Services Safety Investigation Branch (HSSIB) national investigation into weight-based medication errors in children, is unambiguous:
"For frontline prescribers and the patients they treat, nothing has materially changed."
Children are not small adults. Paediatric weight ranges from 0.5 kg to 100 kg, narrow therapeutic margins are common, and the same medicine can carry markedly different doses depending on the indication. EPMA systems designed around adult workflows have struggled to absorb that complexity. The position statement names the consequence: BNFC, the authoritative national resource for paediatric prescribing, is not consistently integrated into EPMA systems at scale, leaving prescribers without immediate access to current, accurate guidance inside the system they are required to use.
Touchdose is Dosium's prescribing execution infrastructure. It brings the British National Formulary (BNF) and the British National Formulary for Children (BNFC) directly into the prescribing workflow, calculates patient-specific and indication-based doses, applies local formulary and governance controls, and writes the prescription back into the live EPMA system.
Touchdose is built on Dosium's live integration with Pharmaceutical Press, the publishers of BNF and BNFC. It is built to the regulatory and clinical safety standards applicable to software influencing prescribing decisions, with versioning, traceability, and an active clinical safety case under DCB0160. It is in routine clinical use across NHS settings today.
The product's design principles map directly to the four areas of the position statement: BNFC-native dosing; patient anthropometry; condition-specific dosing logic; and the regulatory and clinical safety posture appropriate to clinical decision software.
The position statement cites Feather et al., BMJ Quality and Safety, 2025, the peer-reviewed evaluation of the patient-specific, indication-based prescribing approach Touchdose builds on. Led by Dr Calandra Feather, Dosium's Clinical Safety Officer, and supported by the NIHR NW London Patient Safety Research Collaboration, the study reports a substantial reduction in the odds of prescribing error when the system is available, alongside positive prescriber and pharmacist user perceptions.
A peer-reviewed real-world service evaluation, also led by Dr Feather and published in BMJ Paediatrics Open in 2025, reports an 83% reduction in the odds of a prescribing error when Touchdose is used in deployed NHS paediatric care: a 1.2% error rate with the system, against 7.14% in controls.
A position statement is a specification, not an endorsement of any product. Touchdose happens to meet that specification, and Dosium is committed to working with the colleges, NPPG, EPMA vendors, and NHS organisations to translate the recommendations into deployed, governed practice.
Dosium is at the Clinical Pharmacy Congress (CPC) on Friday 8 and Saturday 9 May. Come and see Touchdose in workflow, talk to the team about implementation, and discuss how a BNFC-native execution layer can sit alongside your existing EPMA without creating new maintenance burden.
For implementation enquiries, contact hello@dosium.com.
