The Joys of Saturday Mornings

Leon spends most of his time inside his pharmacy, working on saving the world - one prescription at a time. When he's not dispensing he'll usually be working on achieving his Technician status. It's a hard knock life, but he would not have it any other way!

Oh, the joys of Saturday mornings!

The whole day's pace is set when your alarm fails to wake you up in time and 30 minutes later, you suddenly awake in a cold sweat and do the morning routine in under ten minutes technique. Oh well, it happens and I still managed to get here in plenty of time. I won't say bright-eyed and bushy tailed, because well that's simply not true!

A strong coffee later, and I'm back in the human world.

It's pretty quiet today, the sun is shining and that generally makes everyone well. Also none of the daily methadone patients have arrived either yet, which was partially to be expected although they may just all stroll in 5 minutes before I'm due to close and enjoy the sunshine myself knowing my luck! So I get to the pharmacy forums and see what's being talked about at the moment. Dispensing Hubs.

Now, personally I find it really hard to feel negative about them. Yes they are likely to reduce the amount of jobs for both support staff, Pharmacists and Technicians by their very nature of centralization, but logistically they are so much more efficient.

Dispensing Hubs are better stocked.
By having all the scripts in one place, stock levels could be much better managed for patients. All these quotas and restrictions would not need to happen because the hub should be able to identify quite easily it's stock usage for a month. This is also where Technicians would shine. Whenever you are in doubt about stock, ask a Technician. The dispensary is their baby and they know what is going on with it at all times.

Automation is justified.
Dispensing robots and auto stocking would be an absolute requirement for a dispensing hub, particularly if a hub is planning on looking after prescriptions of 250 different pharmacies at any one time this is going to need the latest in dispensing technology. Also would reduce picking errors down to an absolute minimum as well as long as the stock is registered within the system correctly. Robots do not make mistakes.

Dispensing Hubs are cheaper to run then Pharmacies.
This is where some of the controversy starts to come in. The physical running on a day-to-day basis of a dispensing hub is always going to be cheaper then all those pharmacies dotted around. By a very long way. Also they are cheaper in terms of human resources. The issue with this becomes what happens to those community pharmacies? What happens to the dispensary staff when there's nothing left to dispense? Walk-in are always going to be around, but I find it highly doubtful that any place survives on just walk-in prescriptions. No way.

What do you think of Dispensing Hubs? Are they the future of Pharmacy or the end of it? Should Pharmacy be embracing these new hubs as an innovation or resisting it?