How we made monitored dosage systems an option for more patients

摘要

The average community or hospital pharmacy in the UK has regular requests for packs individually dispensed to patients' prescription needs, to support compliance. Typically, these patients are adults or elderly with mental health or memory problems such that they are unlikely to be able to take their medicines properly otherwise. Unfortunately, many pharmacies have to refuse these requests because they already have a heavy workload of monitored dosage system (MDS) packs and cannot afford the extra man-hours to take on more. For example, we found that it was taking us an average of 20 minutes to produce one MDS pack manually.