Reduce pharmacists' walking time
Reduce stock storage floor area

Diagram 1 Existing layout using dated shelving

Efficient Dispensary Designs analysed walking time in the dispensary of an existing large hospital. The existing dispensary layout is shown in Diagram 1.

The assembly of every prescription requires considerable walking to fetch the necessary medication. The red arrows in the diagram indicate the walking tracks that dispensary staff would take.

The use of simple, flat shelving without partitions between the different products means that all the products are spread out over more linear metres of shelving than would be required for a more compact system.

StockFlow and Rombic shelving are specifically designed for dispensary storage and dispensing work.

They have partitions between the products so that products do not become mingled together despite being placed closely adjacent to minimise the linear metres required.

In addition, StockFlow and Rombic have sloping shelves so that items gravitate to the front of the shelves and are thus more easily and quickly picked out by dispensary staff.

Diagram 2 Optimised layout using StockFlow and Rombic shelving

Because the items gravitate to the front of the shelves, restocking time is significantly reduced as well. The new items are simply dropped into the vacant space behind the current items and there is no need to move the current items in order to maintain date rotation of stock.

The time savings from back filling is about 5 seconds per item.

The StockFlow shelves are 400mm deep to store large quantities of high volume products. The Rombic's 1000mm deep and 315mm wide drawers compact the storage of the low volume products in minimal floor space.

Diagram 2 shows a layout of StockFlow and Rombic shelving that would provide the same storage as in Diagram 1 but would provide time savings of over 1,000 hours and $50,000 per year!

In addition to the time savings, 67 square metres of floor space could be saved and used for other purposes.

The above information was published in the Australian Journal of Hospital Pharmacy, June, 1999