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Hospital employs robots

Three robots have been put to work in a pharmacy in a new state-of-the-art hospital in Scotland. Managers claim the robotic pharmacy at the Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Larbert has cut costs by £700,000 and reduced the number of dispensing errors.

The robots are responsible for stacking drugs onto shelves and also selecting and dispatching them when requests are sent from the wards.

Far from replacing staff the robots have been credited with freeing them up so they can spend more time with patients. Nurses no longer have to write out scripts and physically go to the pharmacy; instead they enter the details on the computer system and a colour-coded screen in every ward tells all medical staff exactly what stage each prescription is at.  

According to a report by the BBC there is one problem; the robots can only handle certain size boxes. However in a sign that the pharmaceutical companies see robotic  pharmacies as the way forward they have already started to alter their packaging to address this issue.