QEH pharmacists are national winners

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he Queen Elizabeth Hospital’s pharmacy, where staff have saved the NHS more than £300,000 in a year by cutting wastage on drugs, has beaten-off competition from around the country to be named Healthcare Recycler of the Year in this year’s prestigious National Recycling Awards.

Winners were announced at a gala presentation in London where organisers, the publication Materials Recycling World, selected the QEH team to top the Healthcare category, above seven other short-listed competitors from the NHS and private healthcare industry.

The judges said: “This winning entry demonstrated a common sense and revolutionary solution to a thorny problem in the health sector. The winner also addressed a significant cost challenge by focusing on reuse and it offers strong opportunity for replication.”

QEH Chief Pharmacist, Dr Mojgan Sani said: “We are absolutely delighted with this award because it recognises the efforts of our team to make best use of the NHS budget. We are making significant savings at a time when we need every available penny to go towards patient care.”

Prescribed drugs account for around £14 million of the QEH annual budget. A proportion of the drugs prescribed to patients will be returned to the pharmacy for a variety of reasons, for example patients having been discharged and not needing further medication, changes to the patient’s treatment or medicines not transferring with the patient when they are moved to another treatment area.

A quality assurance programme was set up within Pharmacy to enable Pharmacy Assistant Barbara Simpson to help recycle medicines returned to the Pharmacy unused. These now go through a rigorous assessment before they can be put back into the system, and this helped to save around £300,000 worth of medicines each year – stock that might otherwise have to be incinerated.

07/07/2014

Richard Humphries, for The Queen Elizabeth Hospital King's Lynn NHS Trust