Realization of new hospital pharmacist work with streamlined injection medicine dispensing process efficiency and work management

Abstract

The role of the pharmacist in the hospital ward is becoming more demanding. However, many hospitals have insufficient number of pharmacists to meet the demand resulting from the addition of further work activities to conventional operations. In this hospital, a similar problem was encountered for the preparation of injection medications. We reviewed the preparation of injection medications to clarify whether improvements to efficiency could enable new work activities to be undertaken with the existing staff.

We retrospectively reviewed injection medication preparation activities with root cause analysis to clarify the problems, and identified issues to be fundamentally improved. Through standardization, improvements to efficiency, reviewing of the inventory management, and the use of quality indicators for prescription confirmations, we reduced the injection medications preparation team from 27 to 18 pharmacists, thereby facilitating enough staff resources for additional work activities. And inventory value decreased to 34 million yen and the number of inquiries increased from 776 in FY 2013 to 1999 in FY 2015.