Offbeat: One woman leads Polyclinic’s pharmacy out of the woods

Records of medicines digitised apart from setting up a cold room and installing security cameras

ISLAMABAD: As it’s patient load grows amid a population explosion in the federal capital and its surrounding areas, the pharmacy at one of the largest tertiary care hospitals in the city is trying to keep up with demand.

In recent years, it has added critical equipment such as fridge and freezers to maintain the temperature of critical medicine apart from digitizing its records, it continues to struggle with a lack of space with its facility littered with boxes of medicines and little space to walk.

Speaking to The Express Tribune, Federal Government Hospital — Polyclinic, pharmacy in-charge Dr Amna said that the facility has been tending to patients for decades and today it accommodates as many as 25 million patients a year. Moreover, it supplies medicines to some 32 dispensaries the hospital runs in different parts of the federal capital.



Dr Amna said that they stock around 570 different types of medicines which have been approved by the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP).

A list of all the medicines with their prices are displayed outside the pharmacy and emergency departments as per government directives, she said.

The pharmacy in-charge further said that that updated rate and stock lists are circulated every fortnight.

Claiming that they are self-sufficient, Dr Amna said that the pharmacy was temperature controlled while they had separate cold rooms with chillers for storing injections and other temperature-sensitive medicine.

Moreover, she said that their storage rooms are equipped with sensors and data loggers which ring alarms if the temperature drops or rises above fixed points.

To address age-old complaints of pilferage from their stock, Dr Amna said that they have computerised the entire record of the pharmacy and have migrated from the old manual record system in order to keep the records safe.

“The digitalization of record has been funded entirely by donations,” she pointed out.

To further enhance security in the store, where stocks worth Rs100 million are stored, they had installed as many as 16 closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras for better surveillance and in order to avoid any burglaries.

However, she admitted to running into bottlenecks. Even though they store and sell a lot of medicines on a daily basis, Dr Amna said that they could definitely do with a larger space to keep the medicine, adding that sometimes they are forced to even store some medicines in the corridors of the hospital which leave them susceptible to damage, temperature variance and even theft.

Further, she said that they have just two pharmacists but this number should be increased to at least 10 to effectively run the pharmacy.

Dr Shahid Hanif, the head of Polyclinic, said that the standard of their pharmacy department has been enhanced in recent times with all essential medicines, including lifesaving drugs, now available round the clock for every type of patient.



He added that around 10,000 patients visit the hospital’s outpatient department (OPD) every day who are provided with the prescribed medicines for free.

Further, he said that the pharmacy also supports other departments of the hospital, especially the operation theatres which operate in two shifts to provide round-the-clock medical support. Dr Hanif further said that apart from medicines, all surgical and laboratory tests items are also provided free to patients.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 7^th, 2019.