Our Managing Director Tracey Sopp visited our Outpatient Pharmacy service which is based at St Nicholas hospital in Gosforth. The Outpatient Pharmacy supplies medicines for CNTW patients, who are in the care of CNTW community treatment teams. These patients will be seen by clinicians across the region in various clinics and the outpatient pharmacy puts together there prescriptions so they are available at the right time.
The Outpatient Pharmacy is located next to the CNTW Pharmacy at St Nicholas Hospital and two facilities work very closely. While NTW Solutions employs its own Superintendent Pharmacist the people who staff the Outpatient Pharmacy are drawn from the CNTW pharmacy itself under standard operating procedures. The Outpatient Pharmacy works very closely with community teams and have worked to develop their working relationships.
The Outpatient Pharmacy manages prescriptions by closely liaising with clinical teams, dispensing work three weeks ahead of a patient’s clinic attendance. In the first week they dispense the medicines, which is sent and checked in the second week, in time for the clinic to take place in the third week.
As well as the highly skilled staff the pharmacy they are joined by a high-tech dispensing robot named DEIDRIE, which stands for Dispensing Everything In Dosettes Really Efficiently. DEIDRIE is a high capacity pharmacy dispensing robot which was pioneering when first introduced in 2017 and is still relatively rare, putting our Outpatient Pharmacy team at the forefront of dispensing practises nationally.
The robot operates to a very high standard of accuracy and works to a zero-baseline rate of mistakes. Medication is checked and scanned and high definition photograph is taken of the tablets. When DEIDRIE dispenses the medication into packs she takes a photograph and only releases the pack if the photograph is exactly the same as the medication that was put into the machine. This process is millimetre accurate and the robot is kept clean because even the presence of dust can lead to her rejecting medication as being different from the original.
The team have recently taken on responsibility for outpatient pharmacy services across north Cumbria. This has involved working closely with the clinical teams to gain an understanding of each other’s processes. This allows for a close working relationship with the teams which is developing well.
The role is rewarding and the team told Tracey about the pride they have in seeing the prescriptions come in and the medication going out to the clinics with a high degree of accuracy, knowing the difference it makes to patients.
