Wireless printing revolutionises pharmacy services

In a nutshell
Organisation:	St George’s Hospital, London
Problem:	Quick and accurate labelling of medicines needed on the ward to reduce waiting times.
Solution:	Wireless label printing.
Suppliers:	Toshiba and Episys.
Benefits:	Staff able to access medical history from ward’s PC and produce label without returning to the pharmacy. Drug stock effectively managed, reducing budget. Facilitates earlier release of hospital beds. Easy to use.

St George's Hospital in South London is one of the UKs oldest and largest NHS hospitals. It is also one of Londons leading teaching hospitals, with an international reputation for patient care and performing around 50,000 NHS inpatient operations and 24,000 outpatient operations each year.

The hospital needed to find a way to increase the efficiency of its pharmacy service, speeding-up the way medication was dispensed and at the same time reducing costs. The only existing label printer was in the pharmacy, which meant staff had to go there to pick up the correctly labelled medication before returning to their ward, even though the medicine itself was available from ward stocks.

The first option the Trust considered was to have permanent printers and labels on every ward but the price of this was prohibitive; so the possibility of mobile printing was explored.

A new wireless system was developed on site by St Georges Pharmacy IT Manager, Steve Beale, with help and support from printer manufacturer Toshiba TEC and Episys, a specialist technology and services company. The aim was to meet the demand of St Georges and other major hospitals for quick and accurate labelling of medicines on the ward.

The solution was based on the Toshiba SP2 802.11b wireless printer, a robust and reliable portable system designed to support WiFi wireless networks and fully compatible with the Cisco equipment already in use at the hospital.

The wireless system now enables ward-based pharmacy staff to access a patients medication history from the pharmacy dispensing system on the wards PC and to produce the label without the need to return to the pharmacy. And by labelling take-home medication on the ward it reduces time and helps to release hospital beds earlier. It is calculated that each wireless printer will be able to serve four wards and, thus, only six will be needed for all the medical wards.

Importantly, the wireless label-printing system also reduces wastage as medicines can be relabelled with the correct To-take-out (TTO) medicine information. Stock can also be efficiently managed: the Trust has already achieved a 15% saving through the re-use of previously dispensed medicines.

The system has been so successful that it is now being rolled out across the whole Trust. The Toshiba and Episys solution has allowed us to bring label printing to the point of need, said Mr Beale, who has won a national innovation award for the development. We can now deliver not only increased service levels and significant cost savings, but also enhanced job satisfaction for staff.

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