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pharmacy delays

Posted By Pharmacydelay

"pharmacy delays"

About: Ipswich Hospital

(as the patient),

I was discharged from the ward at 14. 10 hours today yet had to wait a further 2hrs and 15 minutes to finally receive a prescription from the pharmacy. The pharmacist had been advised of discharge and collected the details of the medication needed at 10. 00hrs this gives an overall time of 6 hours to fulfil a prescription which is an unacceptable amount of time for such a simple task. Whilst it may be down to workload and lack of staffing it is still not what is satisfactory considering the care given by confident nursing staff. Come on Senior Pharmacist, buck up and get more staff, make the staff you have more efficient and pester the highly paid CEO for better funding to ensure that this situation does disappear.

It needs to be pointed out that this is not the first time that pharmacy has delayed my discharge from the hospital which necessitated this complaint.

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Responses

Response from Dominic Mundy, Patient and Carer Experience Manager, Clinical Directorate, Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust 10 years ago
Dominic Mundy
Patient and Carer Experience Manager, Clinical Directorate,
Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust

Submitted on 17/02/2015 at 09:49
Published on Care Opinion at 10:20

Good morning,

Thank you ever so much for taking the time to tell us about your experience at our Pharmacy. We are constantly looking at ways to improve our services and your feedback not only helps us do this but ultimately will help us enhance the patient experience.

I can only apologise for the long delays that you had to endure. This response is to let you know that your concerns have been noted and raised with our Pharmacy Manager who will offer a direct response to you very shortly.

Kindest regards

Dominic Mundy

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Update posted by Pharmacydelay (the patient)

Thanks, it is good to know that someone hears what you have to say

Response from Dominic Mundy, Patient and Carer Experience Manager, Clinical Directorate, Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust 10 years ago
Dominic Mundy
Patient and Carer Experience Manager, Clinical Directorate,
Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust

Submitted on 17/02/2015 at 15:04
Published on Care Opinion at 15:52

We are very sorry for your disappointing experience and frustration.

Your medication can be prepared before your discharge letter is written by your doctor. Once the Pharmacy ward team are aware of your discharge they order any medication that is needed from the dispensary. It sounds like this happened in your case but there may have been a few medicines outstanding that needed a final doctor decision on them before the pharmacy team could place the order. Your discharge letter is a summary of your care and includes a list of your discharge medicines. This is the correspondence that goes to your GP. You cannot be discharged without it. Once written a pharmacist checks it to ensure all your medication is safe and appropriate. Any outstanding medicines are then ordered – presumably there were outstanding medicines in your case.

The hospital is experiencing a really busy time with emergency patients at the moment and this increases the volume of dispensing required - this may have added to the delay in preparing your medicines – we were certainly very busy yesterday. Added to this was a label printing problem in the dispensary yesterday which slowed the dispensing process.

The Pharmacy team are currently working with a team of colleagues across the hospital to look at the discharge process and how we can improve our service. We are also looking at the demand on the pharmacy service and whether the Pharmacy team may be expanded.

Once again we are sorry for the delays you experienced.

Sent on behalf of Emma Travers, Pharmacy Manager

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Update posted by Pharmacydelay (the patient)

My discharge on this occasion was previously to this date so the delays mentioned may not apply but even so it is good to see that someone is indeed taking onboard the issues I raised and doing something about them.

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