PHARMACY MAINTENANCE PROJECT

Pharmacy Maintenance Project

Pharmacy Maintenance Project

Introduction

A healthcare delivery system can be defined as providing patient centric care in an Efficient and timely manner. The United Kingdom healthcare delivery system consists of various personnel devoted to ensuring that patients receive optimum care. Currently, healthcare is striving toward preventive care rather than curative care. Awareness of healthy living is on the rise throughout the country. It is seen in schools and offices with healthier food in cafeterias and many workplaces providing employees with gym facilities. Hospitals provide better healthcare services. Better patient care is provided while reducing costs with the help of continuous improvement initiatives like Lean, Six Sigma, simulation and modelling, total quality management, quality improvement and assurance, supply chain management, forecasting and human factors engineering. More and more hospitals are converting to computer and data driven information maintenance and decision support systems. This ensures reduced medical errors caused by incorrect planning, wrong medication or wrong dosage (Zairi, 2001, pp 282).

Pharmacy services play an important role in patient care. The prime objective of a hospital pharmacy is to follow the rules i.e., to provide the right drug to the right patient in the right dosage at the right time via the right route. The pharmacy dispenses various forms of medications such as unit doses of oral meds, prefilled syringes, premixed IV bags and sterile preparations of IV bags such as admixtures, chemotherapy and total potential nutrition (TPN) bags. In order to provide the right dosage of the right medication, the pharmacy needs to take active steps toward prevention of contamination and errors, especially when compounding sterile preparations. It defines the standards for safety and sterility and is a federally enforceable standard followed by hospital pharmacies preparing sterile mixtures.

The various state boards of pharmacies have incorporated this regulation in various degrees. The colours of the state indicate whether the state's pharmacy laws are harmonized with USP (direct, green); include regulations for sterile compounding and/or parenteral nutrition .However, this has changed over time as it defines standards to prepare sterile compounds in a way to best protect the safety and health of both patients and pharmacy technicians. In addition to the cleaning and garbing requirements of the pharmacy personnel working in the clean room, this discussion guide also emphasizes education and training for an easy transition to the new work environment and sustaining efficient productivity thereafter. The microbial contamination rate for IV admixtures is affected primarily by the environment in which the admixtures are compounded. Experiments were conducted in two environments, a clean table top vs. a laminar air flow (LAF) hood. The results confirmed that the admixtures compounded in a LAF were significantly less contaminated than those prepared on a clean table top .However; it was observed that clean room preparations were significantly less contaminated than those prepared in a LAF hood. This paper discusses the benefits of using the pharmacy program through a computerized project based system (Xie, 2009, pp ...