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The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 270 No 7233 p106
25 January 2003

Robots in the community

The Rowa Speedcase, installed at St Thomas’ Hospital, is now being used in the community

A robotic picking machine is now running in an independent community pharmacy at East Quay Medical Centre in Bridgwater, Somerset. Quayside Chemist is the third community pharmacy in England to have such an automated system installed and has been redesigned to accommodate the new technology.

The robotic system used is the Rowa Speedcase, supplied by ARX, and is similar to that installed at St Thomas' Hospital, London (PJ, 28 October 2000, p653).

The robot is expected to handle 85 per cent of prescription medicines dispensed from the pharmacy; the time taken from when an item is requested by the operator until it is delivered by the system is about 10 seconds. The pharmacy is now working with the supplier of the system to integrate the robot with its pharmacy medication records.

Swisslog to supply automated system A second company, Swisslog, is to supply its automated dispensing system to the Royal Liverpool University Hospital. This will be the first Swisslog system to be installed in a hospital in the United Kingdom. The system consists of five modular storage units, each of which can store about 5,000 items and has an input device and retrieval picking unit. The system is able to dispense 1,500 items per hour, the company says. The system is expected to be installed in April.