The pharmacy department is the custodian of drugs and play a crucial part in a hospital set-up. The pharmaceutical team is responsible for monitoring the supply of all pharmaceuticals. Thus, the team is mandated to purchase, process, dispense, and control all pharmaceuticals within the hospital premise. Pharmaceutical suppliers are vetted thoroughly to ensure quality, affordable, and efficacious medicines.
At KUTRRH, we pride ourselves in quality patient-centered care. The staff comprising of pharmacists and pharmaceutical technologists are highly trained and dedicated to ensuring good patient outcomes and patient satisfaction. The pharmacies outlets include:
The following changes have been implemented as of March 2023 to ensure efficiency in pharmacy operations:
1
Centralized In-patient services at Main Pharmacy
Starting in March 2023, all in-patient prescriptions will be served at main pharmacy. This will take off the workload from Accident & Emergency & specialized clinic pharmacies, so as they can focus on providing quality care to emergency and out-patient prescriptions.
2
Theatre Pharmacy
On average, KUTRRH undertakes about 25 elective and emergency surgeries per week. The creation of the theatre pharmacy will ensure timely and appropriate drug stock management, drug dosing and dispensing. Consequently, this will minimize drug errors and optimize medication therapy monitoring.
3
Increased Human Resource Capacity
Due to increase patient capacities and to better serve our patients, we have tripled our staff from 13 to 39. The team comprises of specialized clinical pharmacists, pharmacists, and pharmaceutical technologists that are qualified and ready to serve. More qualified staff translates to reduced patient waiting time and increased efficiency.
4
Bar-coding
The introduction of barcodes to all pharmaceuticals products is revolutionary to the stock control and monitoring system. The barcodes will ensure easier tracking of all pharmaceuticals from the stores to the dispensing levels. Moreover, barcoding coupled with the “First-Expiry-First-Out” (F.E.F.O) system, will improve inventory control, limit the number of expired drugs, and inform better decisions when making timely orders from pharmaceutical suppliers.
5
In-built Cold Room
Over the past one year, the Pharmacy Commodities and Supplies Unit (PCSU) department has been equipped with a state of the art cold room. This has increases the cold storage capacity of pharmaceutical products especially cancer medication. We are able to see more oncology patients who require these cold-chain medications.
6
Key Performance Customer Service Indicators.
As a pharmacy department, we value feedback. This enables us to better understand the patient’s experience and identify areas of improvement or identify gaps in customer service. This has been implemented by performing two customer service surveys to be conducted every quarter so as to monitor and improve our services.