The Future Of Pharmacy, University Hospitals Of Leicester NHS Trust, England

Main Category: Pharmacy / Pharmacist
Article Date: 16 Dec 2008 - 0:00 PDT

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A new team has been introduced at Leicester's hospitals' pharmacies to reduce the time taken to dispense medicines and improve patient safety. Measuring a colossal eight metres each and costing more than £300,000 each Samson, Delilah, Semper, Suprema, Filbert, Grace and Tiger can work 24/7 and can find and dispense 700 medicines a day, at a rate of 60 per hour, as well as store 25,000 packs of medicines.

The new high-tech pharmacy robots have now been installed at pharmacies at Leicester Royal Infirmary, Glenfield and Leicester General Hospital, helping to free up staff time to spend more time on wards, instead of running around stockrooms looking for drugs. The robots have also reduced errors, as they identify drugs by barcode. Pharmacy staff then do a manual check against the prescription to ensure the right medicines, dose and expiration date goes up to the ward.

The new robodispensers - named by staff after competitions - are large cabinets storing packs with picking heads, when a pharmacy technician requests a pack on a computer the system knows the pack location and will send the picking head to the exact location, within a second. The picking head then pulls the pack from the shelf using a suction arm and grabbers. The selected pack is put onto a conveyor belt and delivered to the technicians operating station be a series of conveyors and spiral shoots.

The systems store packs randomly and will select the oldest orders first. The robot can also automatically load, by putting packs onto a conveyor belt.

The Leicester Royal Infirmary (LRI) robots - Grace, Filbert and Tiger were first installed in April 2006. Samson and Delilah were installed last year and the latest to join the robot family, Semper and Suprema, were installed at the General Hospital in November.

Steve Acres, project manager at the LRI, said the installation of the machine had helped to free up staff time - and create a calmer and more pleasant working environment for staff.

"Staff would be running around to find drugs, particularly at busy times. Now they can now spend more time on the wards, and the pharmacy robots help reduce the turn around time for medicines."

Leicester's hospitals dispense more than one million medicines each year. At the LRI, the biggest of the three pharmacies, 1,300 medicines are dispensed every day.

The installation of the robots, included refurbishment of the working space to provide better workflow and circulation space with new lighting, flooring, and upgrades to meet infection control and fire detection and protection.

Clare Meakin from the General said: "When naming the robots we asked the staff for ideas and had a wide selection of suggestions, including Delboy and Rodney, R2D2 and C3PO, Patience and Fortitude, however we settled on Semper and Suprema which come from the original LGH motto Semper ad Suprema and translates to Always toward Supremacy, this seemed very apt and is a very nice link to the LGH's history."

Source
Carol Burns
Communications
University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust
www.uhl-tr.nhs.uk

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