A hospital is to receive £610,000 of government funding for a digital prescription service.

The investment at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) in King's Lynn, comes as part of a £26m investment in prescription services across 25 hospitals announced today.

Technology will allow the hospital to begin to move away from traditional handwritten prescriptions, which the government claims will save time and money.

The government added that digital prescriptions would increase patient safety, reducing errors by 30 pc according to the NHS Long Term Plan, and giving doctors faster access to patient records.

The funding is part of a wider £78m pot to get more hospitals using electronic prescription services over the next three years.

Nicola Berns, divisional director of clinical support services at the QEH said: "We're absolutely delighted to have been awarded this funding, which means we will be able to implement a state-of-the-art electronic prescribing system, bringing us into the 21st century.

"Most importantly this will lead to significant improvements to patient care as we will be able to improve our drug management for individual patients. Among the other benefits of this new digital system are that it will make it easier for us to monitor and manage medicines across the whole hospital."