South Tees NHS Foundation Trust Pharmacy Team: Our automated medication management journey so far.

Chief Pharmacist Julie Swaddle, Chief Pharmacy Technician Paul Kirby and Omnicell Pharmacy Technician Curtis Booth at South Tees NHS Foundation Trust reflect on their pharmacy automation journey so far, what they have achieved already and share their inspiring automation vision.

"We are a large pharmacy department of 170 staff, split across two hospital sites and with a team of assistant technical officers, medicines management technicians and clinical pharmacists. Our pharmacy is really busy as it includes a pharmacy store, dispensary, aseptic services, homecare and procurement. Despite the vastness of the team and responsibilities, we are all driven with the same goal: “to improve patient safety and reduce administration errors by optimising medication management through automation.” We also wanted to introduce automation to help further reduce omitted doses and drug waste by improving stock efficiencies, as well as improve the security of medicines by ensuring full traceability of medicines usage.

In 2019, the Trust rolled out 15 Omnicell automated dispensing cabinets to help achieve some of these goals. The cabinets have exceeded our initial expectations:

• the cabinets provide a full electronic record easily showing us who dispensed which medicines and on which ward
• automated ordering has improved the pharmacy turnaround times of stock supply to ward
• medication incidents due to picking errors have reduced to zero!
• More importantly, as pharmacy and nursing staff are no longer counting medicines on the ward, searching for keys or looking for medicines in large drug cupboards, our clinical staff's precious time is now returned to face-to-face patient care.
• We’ve recently noticed how valuable the RemoteRX feature is too, in that nurses can remotely request medication from the cabinet via an iPad without leaving the patient’s bedside.

Automating our medication management has also supported us through the COVID-19 pandemic. Stock control was a big challenge for us as prescribing practice was regularly altering due to changes in guidance and ward specialties altered so that we could care for COVID-19 patients. Thanks to the automated dispensing cabinets, we were able to generate real time reports so we could easily and quickly see where the medicines we required were located allowing us to provide continuity of care.

Our dedicated clinical team have been working more flexibly across wards to support the larger workforce in providing patient care through the pandemic and thus, staff have worked on wards that they wouldn't usually work on. Interestingly, this has demonstrated to the nursing staff how valuable the Omnicell cabinets are, as staff who never used an Omnicell cabinet previously, are now asking for one to be implemented on their ward – they found dispensing medication much easier than using a traditional drug cabinet.

Our advice for hospitals embarking on their automation journey is to create an implementation plan. This is a crucial step to provides education, training and a clear step-by-step process for teams to adapt to new workflows and methods of working. We've also recently conducted an Omnicell user feedback survey and based on this we will be launching an internal Omnicell newsletter around the Trust. This will include best practices, updates on stock changes as well as top tips for all users.

Our next step in our automation journey is the introduction of Omnicell's pack picking robot. We were looking for a solution to help improve medicine stock control, streamline work within stores and reduce picking errors, to name a few. We viewed all options in the market, however with having a number of Omnicell cabinets in place and the potential integration between cabinets and the robot it seemed the right decision to choose Omnicell’s robot, as this integration piece fits in with our larger wider digital vision. It was also the most cost-effective solution and Omnicell have shown to be a great partner to support us through our automation journey so far.

Our automation dream is to have the Omnicell automated cabinets rolled out across the Trust which includes having a one-cell cabinet installed in each theatre to help manage controlled drugs. We’re also introducing a new e-prescribing system so we want to integrate this with the cabinets and the robot.

This is only the beginning of automated medication journey!”

Find out more about Omnicell's XT Automated Dispensing Cabinets here