Paper Example on Pyxis Dispensing System

The automated drug dispensing system is a computer assisted drug administrator that allows efficient storage, control, and distribution of system designed for hospitals. The automated drug delivery systems (ADDS) were predicated on helping in the transformation in drug distribution policies with the aim of giving the right dosage administration to patients. Pyxis system was designed by Pyxis, Inc (Jastrzebska, Joanna).. in the early 1960s initially known as unit-dose systems. The automated system was implemented to replace multi-dose systems which gave nurses full responsibility when dealing with the whole process of medication system. Nurses had to a lot of paper work during treatment preparations. Adds or rather the unit dose system provided east health pharmacist with packed and labeled dosage that was ready to be administered to patients as per the administration schedule (Nl, Eastern health).

The system gained worldwide popularity due to its ability to reduce human errors, inappropriate use of nursing time and medication waste since most medicine cabinets were computer assisted. As a result, the Pyxis system enables dose administration effective and efficient as well as enabling every patient to get full attention from the nurses. It also had compelling features such as robot handling, labeling, packaging, and sorting of drugs in the pharmacy department (Jastrzebska, Joanna).

The Pyxis system was placed in nursing unit based cabinets as well as automatic printing of customizable forms and reports. The nursing cabinets are the focal point of all health institutions. Automated drug system is fitted to each nursing cabinet with small variations although providing the same efficiency to get the best out of emergency departments, operating rooms and other departments of health facilities. The ADDS also acts as automated teller machine that saves all the patients confidential documents, retrieves a patient profile upon typing his name and chooses the best dosage that should be administered (Jastrzebska, Joanna).

It would be difficult for the pharmacist to work without automated drug system since before its invention nurses were tasked to manual operations such as the use of medication carts and traditional floor stocking which a pharmacy has little

Cost-saving is by large one of the main reasons for the implementation of ADDS since it significantly reduces drug and personal expenditures that were extremely high before the system introduction. Financial benefits such as reduction of nurses and patient time, improved hospital revenue and billing efficiency and overall service improvement pioneered the implementation of the automated dispensing system over a manual system that was regarded as an inefficient drug distribution network.

Automatic system act as a boundary object between the nursing and pharmacy roles since it 's hard to operate the system. ADDS serves as a barrier to accessing of patient information shared between the two professional institutions since the system distributes work divided between the nurses and pharmacists. Due to such problems, nurses and pharmacy roles differ since nurses are distrustful and go around the system to access the patient's data. As a result, nurses do not approve the scheme as a reliable machine since they feel that they do not access enough patients medication data they initially retrieved with ease during the multi-dose era. Due to the problems and conflicts that arose from medication errors between the eastern health pharmacy and nursing department it highly undermined the efficiency of the system in gearing inter-departmental understanding and cooperation.

To get the best out of ADDS, comprehensiveness, among other attributes should be considered which means that the system would provide both order entry and dose administration. The system should also be improvised to dispense unit doses and also provide the right treatment to patients. The implementations of modular automated units which gives a choice between centralized, decentralized or hybrid system should also be worked on to improve the automated system. The Pyxis system has some medication effects since whenever patients details are left out such as age, the gender of patients since they were not mandatory to fill out in the health facilities (Nl, Eastern health). However, there are various incidents in the medication process, the time the incident occurred, nature of the event, the immediate cause of the events conflicted both the healthcare providers and patients perceptions which resulted in harm to the patient posed by the incident.

The automated drug dispensing system has highly distracted the pharmacist system to grow as a profession due to the nursing shortage. Lack of nurses besides the patient's bedside is limited as a result of the automated system. On the other side, the nursing shortage has led to direct interaction between the pharmacists and direct patient care activities.