Royal Preston Hospital is upgrading its prescription service with a new robotic system.

The new system is being installed in the Pharmacy departments at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust to help Royal Preston Hospital and Chorley and South Ribble Hospital speed up prescription processing to get medication to patients faster.

The current system is 16 years old and is being replaced by a more modern, more efficient robot.

Read more: Tireless nurse from Royal Preston Hospital recognised at awards ceremony

Once Pharmacy staff process the label for the medicine or input an order for stock, the robot selects the box from the shelves, scans it to ensure it is the right medication and transports it along a conveyer belt to a collection point.

The robot at Preston will hold 30,000 packs of medicine and can supply the same number of packs in an hour that can be manually picked in a day.

There are other benefits such as accuracy, with the robot using barcode technology to identify the correct medicine, form and strength required.

It also has improved stock management, for example, the robot always selects the shortest dated stock to use first.

There is a loading speed of up to 750 packs per hour.

Read more: Royal Preston Hospital’s Cause of Death gives ‘unique insight’ as it returns for second Channel 5 series

While the revamp is taking place, the department will revert to manual storage and picking of stock at RPH from January 8 to March 18.

Andrea Ashton, Associate Director of Pharmacy and Chief Pharmacy Technician, said: “Whilst the work is underway, we have contingencies to reduce the impact on patients and service users, however we anticipate there may be some delay.

“Patients and their relatives can help by bringing into hospital medicines they currently take, this also helps with reducing missed doses, improves continuity of care during an inpatient stay and minimises the time it takes to prepare medicines for discharge.”

Subscribe: You can now opt-in to receive Blog Preston news updates through Whatsapp via this link.

Read more: See the latest Preston news and headlines