A ROBOT has brought revolutionary change to a Gwent hospital. Patients at the Royal Gwent Hospital, Newport, now have their medication dispensed by it, saving staff and patients time.

The lean, mean dispensing machine, the largest of its type in Europe, holds up to 45,000 packs of medication, and can dispense 1,350 items an hour.

Shorter waits for medicine prior to patient discharge, and improved safety, are among the benefits for patients of the £650,000 robot, part of a five-year, £2.5 million Assembly-funded programme.

Pharmacy staff can now spend more time where their skills are best used - on the wards.

Pharmacy manager Colin Powell said: "It has revolutionised how we operate.

"All stages of the dispensing process used to be done manually. "We had rows and rows stacked with boxes of medicines and pharmacists had to come back and forth fetching them.

"It was painstaking and the workload was increasing, which kept people in the pharmacy instead of where they should be, which is on the wards with patients."

The majority of medicine packs are now stored in the 18-metre long robot. Staff only have to place items on a conveyor belt. Each one carries a barcode which the robot scans and loads onto its shelves.

It 'remembers' where each box of medication is stored, so when an item is requested through a computer system, robotic limbs speed to the shelf, an arm plucks out the box and loads it onto another conveyor belt which delivers it via a series of chutes to the pharmacist who has asked for it. Meanwhile the pharmacist has printed out patient and medication details on a label to attach to the medication.

The process has reduced average medicine management time - from request to delivery - from four hours to an hour.

Patients cleared for discharge can go home earlier, making beds available more quickly.

And as the system provides patients with a longer supply of medication, they do not need to top-up through their GP as early in their recovery, when they are perhaps still feeling ill.

"The robot can't handle liquid medicines and other non-tablet items, so there is still some manual dispensing," said Mr Powell.