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As part of our ongoing support of Pharmacy, Pharmaceutical Partners of Canada Inc. is proud to bring you a special feature article on the Medication Safety Initiative at Hamilton Health Sciences.
Taking a stroll through the vast Hamilton Health Sciences you can’t help but be struck by the enormity and complexity of this modern hospital. It is a high tech hive of activity, a well-oiled machine of people working in close harmony with technology. Yet, frequently, human beings are the part of the equation that causes the system to fail its patients; human error is often responsible for catastrophic mistakes in medication dispensing.
That’s why Hamilton Health Sciences embarked on its Medication Safety Initiative, a three-stage project designed to implement automated drug dispensing, for safer drug storage and retrieval, better tracking, and less human error. A highly motivated team of medical professionals took on the daunting task of putting these major technological changes into service at all seven HHS sites at once.
The first job was to bring the multi site organization sites together under a common system of medication distribution. In 2005, when the Medication Safety Initiative was begun, there were different systems at various locations – 24-hour full unit dosing at the McMaster site, and the traditional 48-hour or 72-hour dosing at the Henderson and General sites. All HHS facilities now use the 24-hour dosing system; this is safer because, as medication orders change, meds that are no longer ordered for a patient are taken out of circulation. In critical care departments for example, where drugs are changed frequently, it can be unsafe to have a four-day supply of drugs sitting unused in the patient area.
This coordination to 24-hour full unit dosing at all HHS sites laid the groundwork for the arrival of brand new drug distribution technology.
Greater patient safety through automation.
The heart of the new system is the AcuDose automated dispensing cabinet. These electronically monitored and password protected cabinets allow precise tracking of drug use – which medications are accessed for each patient, how much is used, when, and by what nurse. They are free-standing and ergonomically designed, in each nursing area, although the emergency department has three units for various levels of care.