외래 환자 원내 처방의 원외 발행 확대에 따른 업무 효율성 평가

Abstract

There have been increasing workloads for outpatient pharmacy in hospitals because of the increase in patients with severe or chronic diseases. Nevertheless, there is a shortage of hospital pharmacists, thus, the waiting time for drug administration has been extended and medication counseling has been difficult to perform due to the lack of time. Therefore, we investigated changes in the workloads of outpatient pharmacy according to the waiting time for drug administration, patient satisfaction and amounts of optimal inventory after tightening the hospital standards for outpatient prescriptions. From June 2012, we began to tighten the outpatient prescriptions in hospital standards. From July 2012, some drug prescriptions, except for severe diseases, were from outside the hospital; and, patients were counseled for changes in drugs and medications. We estimated the workloads of outpatient pharmacy in the hospital, the time intervals actually taken to complete medicine dispensing, and the amounts of optimal inventory before and after June 2012 through retrospective study. We also surveyed the satisfaction measurements targeted at the outpatients and guardians. As a result, total daily prescriptions on average were 643 and 502 (p<0.001), average waiting times were 21.6 and 16.2 (p<0.001) and the rate of waiting time over 40 minutes were 9.19% and 2.81% (p<0.001), respectively. According to results on patient’s satisfaction, most patients answered that pharmacist’s medication counseling is helpful and waiting time for drug administration has decreased. In addition, the amounts of optimal inventory for insulin and narcotics declined to 63.5% since July 2012. Therefore, the efficacy for prescriptions of outpatient outside the hospital was increased. We suggest that a consistence of managing waiting time for drug administration and improving medication counseling is needed.