Getting the right medicine to the right patient at the right time
Working with the UK’s largest dispensing robot, a team of unsung heroes have been making sure that patients across Greater Glasgow and Clyde get the medicines they need throughout the pandemic.
The team at the Pharmacy Distribution Centre in Glasgow process around 100,000 pharmacy items each week and, with the COVID-19 vaccination roll-out, that effort has expanded to include sending some 72,000 vaccines to clinics every week.
However, their herculean effort is aided by some Amazon-style technology and a huge, robot storage and distribution machine which automates around 80% of the pharmacy work.
The machine is believed to be the biggest of its kind, operating in the UK. At any one time, the Pharmacy Distribution Centre will carry some 10,000 lines of medicines. Work to distribute the vaccines remains a manual endeavour, with the team employed on that working in an adjacent site.
Claire Aliyar, Chief Pharmacy Technician at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, explained: “The team have been working really hard throughout the pandemic – especially at the very beginning, because it just happened so fast. We tried to get as much stock in as we possibly could before it all started and we did manage to get some, but it was going out as soon as it came in.”
The team provide medicines for hospital wards, other acute settings, care homes and prison medical units. This includes major sites such as the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital and Glasgow Royal Infirmary, the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley and the Inverclyde Royal Infirmary in Greenock.
Orders are placed online and the entire, high-tech production line works 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The team’s aim is to ensure that every patient gets the medicine they need, when they need it – with the robot dispensing medicines from amoxicillin to paracetamol (and everything in between) into blue boxes which are then tagged with the ward or location which has ordered them by a member of the team. The boxes are then packed into a fleet of vans ready to be shipped across the Greater Glasgow and Clyde area.
Technology is an important part of the process, and a few weeks before the first lockdown the team took delivery of a smaller robot, one which is refrigerated and can look after medicines that require being stored at cold temperatures. No other UK health board or trust currently has the same technology. The tech also helps to reduce to almost zero the number of errors that can occur in dispensing.
While the machines do much of the heavy lifting, a team of technicians and operatives ensure that the entire process runs smoothly, as was evidenced with the start of the pandemic.
When COVID arrived, the demand ramped up. Claire added: “The team were fabulous, they increased their working hours and came in for extra days. They just rolled up their sleeves, all with the same purpose – to get medicines out for the patients at their time of need.”
The team were then asked to set up a vaccine distribution centre from scratch.
Claire explained: “We did a small proportion of NHSGGC’s vaccine programme before, but nothing on the scale we needed. It became huge, a massive part of our workload and we took the new warehouse space from scratch and now we’re supplying more than 70,000 doses each week – more than 2.1 million doses to date.”
Ahead of the Omicron wave, the team worked to anticipate demand. Claire said: “The more prepared we are, the less pressure there is in the wards and departments.
“It’s been a huge success. I’ve never worked with a team like this – we all look out for each other whether we’re having a good or a bad day. We’ll always be here for each other and the patients, making sure their medication gets to them when they need it.”
Gail Caldwell, Director of Pharmacy for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, added: “Medicines are the most common healthcare intervention and never has this been more important than during the pandemic.
“The pharmacy team at the Pharmacy Distribution Centre have worked tirelessly throughout to ensure NHSGGC had adequate supplies of critical medicines.”