Lancashire: pharmacy robots speed up prescription picking

The robots as like "giant vending machines" with a picking arm, says Richard Marshall of the LFT

New robots that can find prescriptions on shelves in pharmacies far faster than humans can have been put into two hospitals.

The Royal Preston and Chorley and South Ribble Hospital have installed dual systems that are like "giant vending machines" with moving picking arms.

Hospital chiefs said automated picking had been used for 16 years, but the new robots were faster.

And they assured the systems would not lead to pharmacy job cuts.

They new robots would mean the hospitals' 220 pharmacists would have even more time to devote to patient care.

Richard Marshall, the lead pharmacy technician for procurement at the Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: "Everyone thinks systems like these take people's jobs, but the pharmacy staff has grown, if anything.

"Instead of having people constantly picking all of these things manually, they can be out at the patients' bedsides, checking their take-home medicines, checking what they brought in and providing advice on how to get the best out of their medicines."

The robot are so big they each require their own room, with the system at the Royal Preston having the capacity to store 40,000 medicine packs.

The Chorley robot will pick from around 12,000 items.

The robots spring into life when a label is generated.  

The prescription is then picked and carried by conveyor belt to a collection point.

"It reduces the risk of medication errors, such as selecting the wrong pack size or strength," Mr Marshall said.

There is also still human oversight at the other end of the process from a dispenser and a second checker - with the accuracy of the original label being key to the whole process.

The automated system also helps reduce waste, as the the shortest-dated products are automatically selected first.

Chorley Hospital received its new pharmacy robot late last year, while the Royal Preston's is almost fully up and running after a six-week installation period.

During that time, staff had to revert to the hand-picking process, which some of them had never had to do before.