Abstract

One of the missions of hospital pharmacists is to enhance the safety and quality of medicine related processes affecting patients. Strengthening the management of medicines and medical devices (M-MD) in a surgery area is a key activity to meet the demand in terms of emergency and scheduled surgeries. Purpose: To evaluate current processes related to the management of medicines and medical devices for surgeries. Methods: direct observation, regarding the supply of M-MD from pharmacy service to surgery area, analyzing the process flow and identifying critical points. Point-to-point diagrams were developed based on how people actually work. Results: During the situation analysis two main supply processes were identified. They were supply of M-MD from pharmacy to the surgery area and then the supply from this area to operating rooms. Critical points were the increasing frequency of supply requests with the augmented amounts of M-MD in each request. The staff did not have standardized lists of the material necessary for each surgery and they spent a lot of time in administrative tasks. Conclusion: The time spent in administrative processes is detrimental to the quality of health care along with the high frequency of pharmacy orders and the movement of circulating nurses.