Guy and St Thomas’s Trust Boosts Pharmacy Production with Dispensary Management System
Guy and St Thomas’s NHS Foundation Trust includes St Thomas’s Hospital, Evelina London Children’s Hospital, Guy’s Hospital and community services in Lambeth and Southwark. The Trust provides a full range of hospital services for local communities in Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham, as well as specialist services for patients from further afield, including cancer, cardiothoracic, women’s and children’s services, kidney care and orthopaedics. It has one of the largest critical care units in the UK and one of the busiest A&E departments in London with two million patient contacts a year.
The Trust is part of King’s Health Partners, one of five accredited Academic Health Sciences Centres (AHSCs) in the UK. Guy's Hospital is home to a comprehensive Biomedical Research Centre, which, in partnership with King's College London University and King's College Hospital, supports the development of pioneering, patient centric research.
The Guy’s Hospital site houses a state-of-the-art pharmaceutical production facility that provides a range of services tailored to the specific needs of patients both for the NHS, commercial clients and contract manufacturing. The unit manufactures a wide range of formulations including ointments, creams, sterile and topical pharmaceutical products, requiring compliance with GMP principles.
“The raw materials handled by Guy’s and St Thomas’s can change everyday,” explained Terry Baroudi, Project Manager at the Trust. “The complexities of our unit at Guy’s led us to look for an electronic system.” The Operations Manager and her team were invited by CI Precision to view its largest dispensary management system installation (Ci-DMS) in place at a renowned contract manufacturer site, before making a decision to go ahead.
A Ci-DMS terminal was installed in the central weighing room, where it is used to confirm the raw materials are authorised for use. Bulk raw materials and containers are scanned using barcodes and Ci-DMS informs the operator of the quantity of raw material required and ensures the correct quantity is weighed as defined in the manufacturing formulation. Once the correct weight is reached, a dispensing label is printed and the weighed materials are transported to the manufacturing area. Six Ci-DMS manual dosing workstations control and record the addition of the previously dispensed raw materials in the correct sequence for all manufacturing. The Ci-DMS system is installed on fully cleanable, clinical grade tablet PCs that communicate with the balances using Bluetooth wireless technology, with all data instantly stored securely in a central database.
“The manufacturing unit here at Guy’s is very complex, and this type of technology provides the unit with a secure, electronically recorded audit trail of all the materials we use in our manufactured products,” concluded Terry. “To install the equipment, the team of CI Precision engineers worked closely with us at the Guy’s and St Thomas’s Pharmacy and IT&T to minimise disruption and ensure it went as smoothly as possible.”
CI Precision, +44 1722 424 100, sales@ciprecision.com, www.ciprecision.com.