Robots join Swindon’s pharmacy team

Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has implemented two pharmacy robots as part of a £350,000 programme to improve pharmacy services.

The two ARX robots - named Wall-E and Eve after the two characters from the film Wall-E - have been introduced to reduce the time that patients wait for their prescriptions. This should allow patients to be discharged from hospital more quickly.

When patients or members of staff take a prescription to the pharmacy, the robot scans a prescription code using infrared technology. It can then links this to a database that logs the location of the drugs on the shelves.

A robotic arm selects the drugs, places them on a conveyor belt and sends them to the dispensary to be checked by pharmacy staff before being given to the patient.

Sarah Davis, pharmacy operations manager at Great Western Hospital, told E-Health Insider: “We’re looking to improve efficiency and also improve patient safety, reduce human errors in the system and move staff out onto wards so that they can have more contact with patients.

“The robot reduces errors by sorting and retrieving drugs using the bar code technology, followed by dispensing and checking by trained staff, so this helps makes the whole process even safer.”

The trust dispenses more than 200,000 items a year and when fully implemented 80% of those items will go through the pharmacy robots. The remaining 20% are fluids or large measures of drugs.

Davis added: “We’ve already started getting staff out into wards, changing robots around benefits feel calmer and more able to cope with days workloads.

“One of our key aims is to speed up the discharge process, the average time at the moment to get patients their medicine is two and a half hours and we’re hoping to take at least an hour off of that.”

The robots are linked to the trust’s JAC pharmacy system interface and the trust plans to integrate them with a new e-prescribing system next year.

“We have just got the funding agreed for next year and it will link the robots with the system so that the prescription can be processed and delivered with just a few clicks,” Davis added.

Link: ARX