Medicines Packing System launches Woodford Corrections Health

It took a small team from Woodford Corrections Health just 28 days to rapidly implement a new medicine packing system, which has saved hours in manual labour and improved administration errors by 84 per cent.

Before the introduction of Dose Administration Aid (DAA) earlier this year, the nursing team at Woodford Corrections Health would manually prepare 2400 prescribed doses of medication by hand each day – an arduous task which presented significant room for error and reduced available time for clinical care.

However, when faced with a pandemic and threat of disruption, the Woodford Corrections Health team brought the project to live within weeks, with medications for approximately 800 prisoners now packaged off-site and delivered to Woodford in individually labelled sachets under the new DAA system.

Medicine packing systems are now industry standard throughout non-hospital healthcare facilities in Australia. However, implementing such a large system in just a matter of weeks is far from standard.

Caboolture, Kilcoy and Woodford Directorate Pharmacy Director Tim Dunn said DAA was rapidly implemented at Woodford Corrections Health and showed what could be achieved by a small group of determined healthcare workers.

“It was only 21 days from when a decision was made to pursue the project until the first medicine packs were in use and only 28 days until all prisoners on medication had a medicine pack in use (approximately 800 DAAs),” Mr Dunn said.

“Preparing hundreds of doses by hand one after the other allows room for error, which has been mitigated using DAAs packed by machines – in 2019, a total of 1845 medication orders were checked, revealing 59 errors for an error rate of 3.2 per cent.

“In 2020, after the implementation of the medicines packing system, nine errors were found from 1721 medication orders, for an error rate of 0.52 per cent. This represents a considerable 84 per cent reduction in medicine administration errors.”

With much less time preparing medicines, staff are now able to spend more time delivering quality clinical care.

With an increased focus on hygiene in 2020, DAAs packed in a controlled environment provide another strong argument for their use.

Woodford Corrections Health Pharmacist John Willett said processing medication charts of every new prisoner transferred into the centre allowed for timely intervention when prescribed medicines were not normally stocked.

“Pharmacists also review every medication chart of every prisoner who attends a medical appointment, which prevents prescribing errors or allows for pharmacist intervention that may improve treatment outcomes,” Mr Willett said.

Staff report high levels of satisfaction with the new initiative which is administered by a five-day on-site pharmacy presence. This notable improvement was recognised during the recent Australian Council of Health Care Standards (ACHS) review of 2019 accreditation outcomes.

The rapid and significant drop off in medication incidents since implementation has been sustained.

ACHS assessors said they had never seen a facility with an area that did not meet accreditation requirements turn things around so quickly that it was now far exceeding expectations.

“The implementation of the medicines packing system is a major step forward in providing best practice healthcare at Woodford Correctional Centre,” Mr Willett added.