You can't miss the logistics centre on the Gasthuisberg campus ringroad: every day the large unloading quay with eight gates receives around 25 trucks and 30 delivery vans for the supply of mail, food, medicines, medical devices and all kinds of other products needed at the hospital. The right-hand gates are connected to the brand new hospital pharmacy warehouse.
Behind it is a huge 10-metre-high room with 168 measuring points to keep temperature and relative humidity within strict margins. Robots and conveyors there help in the efficient storage of drugs and medical devices and in their transport to the medical wards. In the design, much attention was paid to (fire) safety and employee ergonomics.
Such a high-tech warehouse solution is actually unseen in our country for a hospital. This is really is at the level of industrial distributution centres
Dr. apr. Thomas De Rijdt, head of the hospital pharmacy
In the big reception hall everything gets unpacked, checked and sorted. The most current and voluminous drugs are being restocked in push-through racks and removed according to the ‘first in, first out’ principle. IVs are stacked three-high one above the other in racks per pallet using a forklift. Flammable products are stored in a specific fire room, including fitted with a grid floor with collection tray and additional ventilation. .
Other products are being stored by robot arms and shelf lifts in four large platforms up to 18 metres high, spread over four floors. Via a scanning system, the robot remembers where which box is located so that products can be retrieved later. For resources requiring refrigerated storage, the warehouse has four cold rooms, including two large independent cold rooms and a built-in freezer cell.
Tray robot
About 60% of all drugs are placed in special trays, scanned and stored via an automatic conveyor by four robots in 5,763 possible locations in high shelves. This saves a lot of space. After being ordered by a department, the robot retrieves the right bin from the storage area and guides the warehouse worker via lights, colour codes and special tags in ‘picking’ the necessary products. The applications of 9 different departments can be processed simultaneously.
In the past this was mainly done manually, a very labour-intensive process when you consider that as many as 14 million doses of drugs and 31 million pieces of medical devices are processed in hospital every year.Warehouse manager Said Arredouani
For urgent deliveries between the warehouse and the central hospital pharmacy the team can rely on a transport robot, nicknamed ‘Wall-E’, which autonomously finds its way through the logistics corridors. Also new is that medicines have recently been transported to the departments in reusable, green plastic containers.
Unit doses
This thorough update of the operation was also necessary to meet changing legislation. For instance, the government is imposing increasingly strict requirements around the traceability of medicines.
Pharmacist Eline Simons: “In terms of patient safety, every pill needs to be scanned individually, together with the patient's wristband so that the identity and origin are traceable. This means that unit doses need to be packed individually, but unfortunately the pharmaceutical industry is not entirely cooperating with this. For a lot products we have to unpack and reblister the medication, label it with a unique bar code that also contains the lot number and the expiry date.” This repackaging to unit doses is done is done dust-free in the cleanroom of the new warehouse.
Ready for the future
Today the fourth and the fifth floor of the logistics platforlm are not in use yet. In the coming years, a large clean room will be built there for preparations, including cytostatics and the advanced therapeutic products (such as gene therapy) of the future. In time, our pharmacy warehouse will be responsible for unit doses and preparations in the wider region, in cooperation with the Plexus hospital network. There will also be a separate area for the processing and storage of (experimental) drugs used in the context of clinical studies.