Automation rollout across Trust reduces medication errors and patient harm and frees up valuable time for medicines optimization
Northumberland Tyne and Wear Trust provides mental health, learning disability and neuro rehabilitation services across North East England. The Trust is a Global Digital Exemplar and recently consolidated its three pharmacy departments into a single dispensing hub. The Trust uses Omnicell’s automated medication dispensing cabinets in many of its wards and an Omnicell VBM 200F to fill its medication adherence packs.
The Challenge
- Release nursing timeback into face to face patient care.
- Enhance productivity to make the best use of limited pharmacy resource.
- Enhance patient outcomes by expanding the reach of the clinical pharmacy service.
- Save money and develop the commercial potential of the Trust.
- Release nursing timeback into face to face patient care.
- Enhance productivity to make the best use of limited pharmacy resource.
- Enhance patient outcomes by expanding the reach of the clinical pharmacy service.
- Save money and develop the commercial potential of the Trust.
The Solution
Omnicell VBM 200F and Automated Dispensing Cabinets
The Trust is a Global Digital Exemplar and recently consolidated its three pharmacy departments into a single dispensing hub. The Trust uses Omnicell’s automated medication dispensing cabinets in many of its wards and an Omnicell VBM 200F to fill its medication adherence packs.
Omnicell VBM 200F and Automated Dispensing Cabinets
The Trust is a Global Digital Exemplar and recently consolidated its three pharmacy departments into a single dispensing hub. The Trust uses Omnicell’s automated medication dispensing cabinets in many of its wards and an Omnicell VBM 200F to fill its medication adherence packs.
The Impact
Patient safety, frees up staff time, reduces medication errors, created new revenue streams.
- Significantly reduced medication error rates for dispensing patient adherence packs.
- Non-automated error rate prior to installation was 0.69%*. However, post implementation no errors (0%) were associated with the VBM automated dispensing system itself after a three-month period.
- This meant that machine itself provided 100% accuracy throughout the dispensing process.
- While using the automated system, a small element of human interaction is still required and this did result in a minimal number of errors within the 3-month period (0.17%) either before or after the automated dispensing had occurred.
- Further staff training is helping to resolve these issues and it is thought that increasing the number of prescriptions dispensed by the VBM could reduce the risk of any potential human error even further.
- As a result, six months after implementation the pharmacy is so confident with the accuracy provided by the system that they are now planning to remove the second pharmacy check completely.
- Reduced time taken to dispense MA packs and number of staff required in the dispensing process.
- Prior to implementing the VBM, it took on average 20 minutes to manually prepare one pack. Post automation this was reduced significantly to just 3 minutes per pack.
- As a result, the pharmacy estimates that 2-3 WTE staff roles have been saved by the installation of the VBM.
- This has allowed staff to pursue more clinical roles including:
- continued development of optimisation strategies to improve patient outcomes and cost effectiveness of medicines
- advising patients on their medication and working as part of a multi-disciplinary team to educate patients on important steps to improve and maintain their health.
Developing the commercial potential of the Trust
The academic study and process validation will enable the Trust to approach neighboring Acute Trusts to offer to provide safe and reliable dispensing of their patients’ medication adherence packs. This will provide NTW with a new revenue stream as well as saving the Acute Trusts money as they will no have to outsource to external organisations – ensuring money is kept within the NHS.
- 2-3 WTE staff time saving
- 17 minutesaving per pack
The Trust has over 30 Omnicell cabinets installed across over half of its wards. Stock in the cabinets is managed by pharmacy teams on the sites who work directly with the wards. This means that nursing staff are freed up from medicines management and can spend more time with patients, further improving patient safety. Since installation CQC have inspected the wards with Omnicell cabinets and are complementary about improvements to the quality of care they facilitate. The cabinets have reduced the risk of concerns in relation to safe and secure management of medications.
- O.4 WTE nurse time released per wards
- 10-15% drug spend savings
- 99.75% medicines available for administration when and where needed – ensuring patients receive medication on time
- 29% reduction in overall medicines supply transactions
- 64% reduction in incidents relating to controlled or misusable medicine
"We’ve had really positive experiences with Omnicell technology. It’s now clear that the VBM will allows us to almost eliminate pharmacy dispensing errors in medication adherence packs. I believe so much that can be done around improving the human element of pharmacy processes and ways of working has been done so I can’t think of any other intervention that will allow us to make a step change around patient safety other than technology. Automating the dispensing of MDS reduced the frequency of errors and the risk of harm for patients. Automation reduced both the time taken to dispense monitored dosage systems and the number of pharmacy staff required in the dispensing. This enables pharmacy staff to spend more time in clinical roles which also contributed to patient safety."
Ewan Maule, Deputy Chief Pharmacist, NTW Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust
