According to the guidelines of Japanese Society of Hospital Pharmacists, pharmacists should prepare medicine bags or labels for dispensing injectable medicines. However, it is not easy to establish a new system for printing these bags and labels quickly and efficiently all hospitals. At the moment many hospitals seem to let nurses write the information by hand directly on the transfusion bottles. This involved the risk of serious accidents due to miscommunication between pharmacists and nurses.
Because we established a successful advanced system to achieve a maximum output with a minimum effort, its effectiveness is herein reported.
We prepared labels using the data of our audit manual for the dispensing of injectable medicines. These labels included essential comments and information for both doctors and nurses.
It takes 60-120 minutes to creating labels for 60 to 90 inpatients, while some additional time is needed to double check of the labels. As a result, this system has increased our workload by one and half times. In contrast to our increased workload, clear printed letters and useful comments and information has contributed to a decrease in the workload of the nurses in the ward. This cost effective, efficient system has received high acclaim from the staff members of other departments, and strongly confirms the role of pharmacists as risk managers.
We now intend to further improve this system for proper dispensation of injectable medicines more properly and efficiently in the future.