University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust is one of the largest acute teaching Trusts in the UK, comprising University Hospital in Coventry and the Hospital of St Cross in Rugby and working in partnership with Warwick University Medical School and Coventry University. It has more than 10,000 staff and delivers services across the West Midlands region.
Our Pharmacy Department’s automation journey started in 2018 with the introduction of automated dispensing cabinets (ADCs) on our wards, clinics and theatres - 72 in total. This gave us 24/7 stock visibility across the whole organisation and improved our compliance with storage requirements.
A significant benefit is the ability for ADCs to order their own medication, which was previously a manual tally exercise. The ADCs enable Controlled drug storage and electronic registers, a major advancement for our department.
The journey continued in 2023 when we installed a dispensary robot which can hold more than 50,000 packs. Most of our two million medication transactions per year are now automated. Each morning ward ADCs send their top-up requirements to our dispensary robot and boxes are picked and ready at 9am. This whole process is now fully automated. We have used the time released by automation to in supporting medicines management and reducing waste at a ward level where our ward colleagues and patients are.
We have just embarked on our Electronic Patient Record (EPR) journey, with the new system going live in June 2024. The roadmap towards true digital medicines management has been laid, as we work with our partners to connect our EPR solution to our ADCs and dispensary robot.
Once connected, a patient’s medication journey will be truly digital/automated end to end. This has the potential to support our pharmacy professionals to spend more time on patient-facing clinical activity and less time on manual dispensing processes.
Automation requires a vision and good governance with safety built in. As long as these are in place, it will prove to be a positive addition to our pharmacy team.
