Medication Turnaround time in Hospital Pharmacy Department.

Medication turnaround time is defined as the interval from the time a medication order is written (manually or electronically) to the time the medication was administered. Monitoring medication turnaround time in inpatient settings allows organization to measure the impact of their efficiency of patient care. Objective: To trace the delays in the order and delivery system of In-patient pharmacy and check the average total time consumed in delivering drugs and medical consumables to the patients. Method: A time motion study was done in the in- patient pharmacy at a multi specialty hospital in Jaipur. A sample size of 300 indents was taken by using nonprobability convenient sampling method. Out of 300 indents, 56.6% were normal indents, 26.6% were new admission indents and 16.6% were urgent indents. Both primary and secondary data has been used in the study. The secondary data was obtained from the track care software, which was used in the pharmacy. SPSS and Microsoft excel was used for data analysis. Results: The study found that 25.2% of the normal indents, 48.7% of the new admission indents and 60% of the urgent indents were delayed. In addition, the average time taken to deliver normal indent was found to be 1hour 8 minutes, for new admission indent it was 48 mins and for urgent indent it was 1hr 20 minutes i.e. more than the normal indent and new admission indent. It was also found that the peak hours of the indent order were 10:00 pm to 12:00 am, also the peak hours of indent order and the availability of work force at that time was contradicting. The average number of indents per day was found to be 1224. Conclusion: Through this study, we were able to identify various points of delays, which were occurring in delivering indents to the patients. The results of the study revealed that all types of indents were delayed; especially urgent indents also got delayed, which became the major area of concern. In addition, if hospital follows indenting practices by the nursing staff, than the training for nursing staff is essential requirement regularly, to overcome this problem. The results of the study will definitely benefit in improving TAT of the pharmacy indents and most importantly the patient care.