Article Text
Abstract
Background and importance To improve the quality of its services and the satisfaction of its customers, our hospital’s pharmacy has experimented with a weekly pharmaceutical presence in the operating room to collect and process pharmacy claims and complaints, which may improve communication between the pharmacy team and the operating room.
Aim and objectives To highlight the importance of a pharmaceutical presence at the care units through collection and processing of complaints at a pilot service: the operating room.
Material and methods To analyse the claims of the medical and paramedical staff collected during the weekly pharmaceutical presence in the operating room over a period of 1 month, and to assess measures undertaken for the treatment of these claims.
Results During the study period, 58 complaints were collected: 69% related to medical devices and 31% to drugs. Data processing revealed the following findings: most of the complaints concerned articles ordered but not yet delivered by suppliers (15%), available articles with limited quantity (14%), unavailable articles for which no requests were made (14%), articles that did not belong to our hospital nomenclature (12%), articles available at the central pharmacy but not available at the operating room pharmacy (10%) and articles for which the annual forecast quantity was already consumed (10%). Measures taken by the pharmacy team: relaunch suppliers for articles already ordered; increase endowments (within the limits of availability); propose indication limitations for articles with critical stock; ordering items whose annual forecast quantity was not totally consumed; proposed alternatives for articles that did not belong to our hospital nomenclature; endowment of the operating room pharmacy by the articles available at the central pharmacy and making special orders, with limited quantities, for articles for which the annual forecast quantity was already consumed.
Conclusion and relevance The pharmaceutical presence in the staff of the operating room has helped to better understand the needs of users in order to meet these needs within the limits of what is possible. In fact, the involvement of the pharmaceutical team in care units makes it possible to improve customer satisfaction and to increase the overall quality of therapeutic care.
References and/or acknowledgements None.
No conflict of interest.