Improving Pharmacy Dispensing Performance Through Time Management

The aim of this project was to carry out a change model in one of Family Medicine Clinic’s Pharmacy in Abu Dhabi. While, the objectives of the project were to improve patient satisfaction through improving patient waiting time for medications collection, improving patient’s knowledge about the pharmacy services and then generalize the implemented change in all other six clinic’s pharmacies. The change was happened because of current system of dispensing patient’s prescription ‘in turn’, which created a discomfort among many patients as well as some patients were not taking a proper counseling over medications use, because of the need to finish all taken prescriptions without any delay. The change that was introduced in the pharmacy categorized the prescriptions into two categories; one for three or less medications prescription (directed to fast track window) and the second for more than three medications prescription (a ticket number was given for the patient to wait). Kotter eight step change model was used to initiate the change, which started by a crucial step in any change: creating a strong sense of urgency. This model provided the opportunity to create a vision and strategy to align people in the change process and underpin change efforts. The model ended with anchoring the new practices in the change to be as new culture to work with it. On the other hand, change evaluation was done through a variety of tools like: patient satisfaction survey (81.93% of patients were overall satisfied with the pharmacy services raised from 53%), waiting time data (average waiting time was reduced by 63% for category 1 and by 41.3% for category 2, giving the overall reduction by 50.3%), process mapping, staff interview (all staff are satisfied) and number of waiting time complaints (dropped dramatically by 67.25%). One of the most powerful impacts of the change on organization was the creation of a change committee to undertake all change projects in the department, take care of newly implemented change and generalize the change in other six pharmacies. In conclusion, robust collaborating of well defined and very important key elements in the change process can ultimately result in well managed and successful change.