Shaping the future: Your voice on new Hub and Spoke Dispensing Proposals

The healthcare sector faces immense pressure due to staffing shortages, recruitment difficulties, and the struggle to find time for essential tasks. Dispensing medications, a critical component of patient care, has become outdated and laborious. This inefficiency leads to longer wait times, overworked staff, and a higher risk of errors.

Current legislation exacerbates these issues by restricting the assembly of medicines to specific locations, creating bottlenecks and hindering the optimisation of resources.

PSUK's Innovative Solutions

PSUK addresses these challenges with innovative solutions like Golden Tote, which automates the assembly of medicines. This reduces the burden on staff, ensuring quicker and more accurate dispensing. The result is better management of workloads and improved patient outcomes through reduced wait times and timely medication delivery.

Legislative changes on the horizon

The government plans to introduce legislation enabling two models of hub-and-spoke dispensing across the UK, set to take effect on January 1st, 2025. This will allow the healthcare sector to integrate new models into their operations, with the Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) proposing to allow dispensing doctors access to hub pharmacies. These changes follow a 2022 consultation aimed at removing barriers that limit hub-and-spoke models to pharmacies within the same legal entity.

New Hub-and-Spoke Models

Proposal Spoke-Hub-Spoke: Patients present prescriptions at a spoke pharmacy, which sends them to a central hub for assembly. The completed prescriptions are then returned to the spoke pharmacy for patient collection or delivery.
Proposal Spoke-Hub-Patient: Prescriptions are presented at a spoke pharmacy, sent to a central hub for assembly, and then delivered directly to the patient, bypassing the spoke pharmacy after the initial handover.

Original Pack Dispensing

A further proposal suggests allowing prescriptions to be dispensed in original packs, with split packs rounded up or down by 10%. This would streamline the dispensing process and reduce waste.

Benefits of Original Pack Dispensing

Increased efficiency: Speeds up workflow, allowing more prescriptions to be handled in less time.
Reduced waste: Fewer partial packs discarded, reducing medication waste.
Cost savings: Efficiency and waste reduction lead to significant cost savings, which can be reinvested in patient care.
Enhanced patient care: More time for patient consultation and care, improving overall patient experience.

Impact on PSUK members

These Legislative changes could provide some significant efficiency benefits to PSUK members by allowing offsite assembly of items by third parties, reducing stock levels, and streamlining operations. PHOENIX’s automated medication assembly centre, established in 2017, can reduce stock by 54%, improving inventory management and reducing costs. The facilities cutting-edge technology ensures high efficiency and accuracy in dispensing.

While our pouch-based monitored dosage system averages 1.6 million pouches per month, serving 31,000 patients monthly. This capability underscores our commitment to improving the efficiency and reliability of the dispensing process, handling increased prescription volumes and ensuring members benefit from new dispensing models.

Centralised automated dispensing

Centralising the assembly of repeat prescriptions frees up valuable time for healthcare colleagues, enabling them to provide essential support, advice, and services. Centralised automated dispensing is more efficient than branch-level assembly, further enhancing the ability to meet patient demands effectively.

We need your feedback

To align with these proposals and ensure our members are well-supported, we need your input.

We are seeking your views, opinions, and thoughts on future propositions from PSUK to support our members with these legislation changes and the impact..

Please share your feedback by completing the form