Prescribing Toolkit

Q. Every time I click on the Prescribing Toolkit icon I get a "Session expired" message.

A. This is because the cache on your browser or firewall is holding an older copy of the Prescribing Toolkit Logon screen. To get round this, you should first delete all temporary files from your browser. This is done by selecting "Tools…Internet Options" (IE5) or "View…Internet Options" (IE4) then selecting "Delete Files" from the "Temporary Internet Files" section. Close down the browser, restart it and log on as normal, but hold down the SHIFT key on your keyboard while clicking on the Prescribing Toolkit image.

This will open a new browser window containing the Prescribing Toolkit Logon screen. You should now press the REFRESH button in the browser and the logon screen will be reloaded from the PPA's server rather than your cache. This will be apparent by the date and time at the bottom of the logon screen.

Q. Why can't I print graphs?

A. There are 2 ways to print graphs using the Toolkit system. The first is to use the "FILE…PRINT" option in the browser itself. This is fine for most PCG/PCT and Practice level graphs as all the data fits easily on a single page. For a graph containing HA level data, by default only a few HAs will be shown on the screen. You can print this view as before then scroll the view to display the remaining HAs and print again. To get all HAs printed on the same page you need to click on the graph and press the lower-case "r" key on the keyboard. This will reset the graph view and show all 99 HAs on the screen at once. You should now use the "PRINT" button situated below the graph. This button will only work after you have added the PPA site to the list of trusted sites on your browser. This is explained in the on-line help and the procedure is slightly different for Internet Explorer 4 and IE5.

Q. Why do the organisation names print out as "XXXXX"?

A. This seems to be a problem with Internet Explorer and the Java graphing applet that is used. It is highlighted by the fact that the organisations have a cyan bar surrounding their names.

It can be fixed by reducing the number of colours on the windows desktop to 65536 (16-bit) or fewer. Click on the Windows "Start" button, select "Settings", "Control Panel" and double-click on the "Display" icon. Select the "Settings" tab and reduce the "Color Palette" setting.