Riverside Hospital's Pharmacy Services
3)
Goals:
The main goal of management is to reduce the ADEs and work more efficiently and solve the long term problems existing in the hospital pharmacy. Saving time and cost is another goal that the management wants to achieve through the new system. Ensuring that the five rights are practiced which includes The Right Patient, The Right Medication, Right Dose, Right Route, Right time.
Management Criteria:
The criterion set by management is implementing the system which improves the problems existing in the current system and achieves its goals with the least possible cost due to the cut in funds by the Government.
Analysis:
There are many options that be considered to overcome the persisting issues. The first option is to introduce the Unit dose system. The unit dose system is a medication dispensing system which the doses are individually prepared and packaged for each individual patient in a bubble pack, which then labeled with the name of drug, patient, dose and the time the medication needs to be given, each bubble has the medication for five days. The main goal is to reduce the errors in medications and medication waste, nursing time involved in dispensing the medications to the patients and it will also reduce the inventory holding cost. The criteria would be to see if the system has reduced the errors and issues and how much cost does it saves and incur.
Even though the option might help in reducing the errors and might save time that can be used somewhere else to treat more patients, but it isn’t cost effective and incur more cost than the bulk purchasing, and it requires more labor then in bulk purchasing which can be bought once and used for long period.
Another option available is to apply the Bar-Code Medication and Administration system (BCMAS), this system has bar codes for each drug and for nurses and