13th May 2024
Three valued members of the pharmacy team have received a makeover with a difference.
But with their robotic arms and infrared red scanning capabilities, they are not your typical colleagues as Ted, Dougal and Jack are the Southern Health and Social Care Trust’s pharmacy robots.
The robots, who have been part of the team based at Craigavon Area Hospital for the past decade, provide the trust with a stock management system that optimises processing, space and staff resources.
They recently received an upgrade which has seen them reconfigured and three additional picking heads added, increasing their capacity and speed.
Paul Rafferty, Assistant Head of Pharmacy, Procurement & Technology Lead, said:
“This upgrade means that that we can now process at least 5000 requests a day.
“Our robots provide us with automatic picking of both ward top-ups and items for discharge prescriptions which are delivered directly into the ward top-up box or directly to the dispensing technician at their PC.
“They improve picking accuracy and organises stock outputs in date order to ensure earliest expiring stock is used first therefore helping the trust ensure our patients safety.
“Stock is automatically scanned and loaded into the robot, allowing for enhanced delivery capacity. This ensures constant stock inputting to the robots and checking of products within the Pharmacy Department.”
The robots also restock themselves overnight.
“Ted, Dougal and Jack are on hand during the night to assist our on-call team to remotely output medicines into the 24hr nurse access cupboard to ensure our patients can access newly prescribed medicines at any time.”