An Encounter with a "Dispensing Robot"

Is dispensing robot doing what pharmacist can do and perhaps perform even better?

Dispensing robot: the way forward in retail pharmacy?

Weldricks Pharmacy is a family owned business with 59 community pharmacies throughout the South Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire areas. They began their business at Doncaster in the 1930’s and became a Limited Company in 1984.

Mr Tony Shaw, a teacher practitioner at the University of Nottingham in the UK , arranged for Dr BY Low from the School of Pharmacy at the Malaysia Campus to visit a Weldrick pharmacy equipped with a “dispensing robot” (Rowa Vmax) that stores and retrieves medicines via an automated system. Having a “dispensing robot” at the back of the dispensing area seems to be futuristic and compact storage capacity means you can enlarge the sales floor!

The state of art equipment has been able to increase customer services in a number of ways: a) Increase in accuracy—the “dispensing robot” is reliable and avoid problem of human picking errors; b) Increase in efficiency—the “dispensing robot” is able to dispense medicines about 5x faster than human beings and thus reducing patients’ waiting time; c) Pharmacist’s time has been saved and freed to concentrate on clinical oriented tasks such as medication use review, patient counselling, the New Medicines Service, Minor Ailment schemes, Anti coagulant clinics, health screening services, influenza vaccination services and etc.