AN INNOVATIVE tool that prioritises high-risk inpatients and streamlines workflows was presented at the Advanced Pharmacy Australia Medicines Management conference in Adelaide last month.
Pharmacist Neve Munro from Mackay Hospital and Health Service discussed the development of the Risk Assessment Tool (RAT) that has revolutionised inpatient care at Mackay Base Hospital.
With limited clinical pharmacists available to manage an increasing workload, the department faced an urgent need to optimise its resources, Munro explained.
The tool was created to address this challenge by enabling pharmacists to prioritise high-risk patients more effectively and allow the department to maintain safe, efficient and equitable patient care to ensure the most critical cases received the necessary attention.
A small team started working on the tool in Oct last year, generating 31 clinical indicators after a literature review.
"These indicators were then localised for the Mackay population," Munro told delegates.
Pulling data from the hospital's medical records creates the dashboard which shows pharmacists the high risk, medium risk and low risk patients for each day, Munro explained.
"This helps us target our work and benefits staffing because it reduces the time for pharmacists to manually prioritise patients, which can take up to 1.5 hours a day.
"The RAT decreases the time wasted, increases efficiency and really allows us to see the more high-risk patients."
Munro described how the department restructured its workflow and technician workforce to support this model once the RAT was rolled out in Feb after significant validation and trialling.
"We did a staff satisfaction survey and overall there's been a significant improvement in pharmacy camaraderie, which is due to transparency in workflows which has helped improve the level of teamwork," Munro said.
The tool is now being rolled out to other Mackay HHS facilities.
"It's great to see you can still make big waves in healthcare, even from a regional centre, which can have an effect on the care delivered in other centres," Munro said.
"There's a lot more things we can do and hopefully, more projects we can work on in the future." KB
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