ESTABLISHING PHARMACY OPERATIONS

Establishing Pharmacy Operations in a Tertiary Hospital in Qatar

Establishing Pharmacy Operations in a Tertiary Hospital in Qatar

Introduction

The State of Qatar is an Arab emirate which occupies a small area of land in the Persian Gulf. Qatar is a nation which has abundant resources of gas and oil. It has a population of almost 2 million, which largely consists of immigrants. Furthermore, Qatar is said to have the highest gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the world. Qatar is a growing economy. However, the facilities and infrastructure of professionals belonging to the healthcare system, is not as good as developed nations. In Qatar, there are no pharmacy regulatory authorities which safeguard the public (Burke et al. 2008, pp. 721).

Flow of Pharmacies operations

The fundamental operation of pharmacies in tertiary hospitals is to provide medications for patients. The medications supplied are prescribed by doctors to both in-patients and emergency patients. There are other functions as well which pharmacies perform such as record keeping, answering patients' queries related to drugs, obtaining clarifications on drug orders, filling prescriptions for outpatients, answering telephone calls etc. It is the primary objective of pharmacies to provided drug orders with minimum errors and delays. However, there is a conflict between the two goals (Rouse 2004, pp. 2059). To minimize errors, pharmacies usually use a complex procedure of checks. Pharmacists check the orders once they get filled by technicians. This is done to ensure there are no or minimum errors. In case of an error, it will be difficult to estimate the economic cost if the error. This is because hospitals treat humans, and it will be impossible to determine the economic cost of a death of a patient due to a drug filling error. Therefore, it remains a priority for pharmacy managements to ensure there are no errors, leading to economic cost issues or death of a patient. As a result of the stated objectives of minimizing errors, it becomes essential to review the performance based on targets. The pharmacy operations demand elaborated precautionary measures to ensure there are no deviations from the targets. Therefore, such critical measures differentiate pharmacy's performance measures from other systems. Elsewhere, deviations from targets remain undesirable. However, such deviations are not always unacceptable. Since the last decade or so, the pharmacy operations in hospitals have become computerized to some extent (Vlasses 2007, Pp. 1041). This system incorporates a database system which creates records and profiles of in-patients (patients who are admitted to a hospital). This database labels the medications for each patient which helps in retrieving information about the patient's drug history. This is called a patient's profile. Simulation models are also used which are related to such scenarios. A pharmacy in a hospital deals with two types of orders. The first type of order is called a critical order which is related to medications for emergency patients. The second type of order is called a regular order which is related to medications for non-emergency ...