What do you think if the pharmacist who prepare drugs for you is not human?
According to Wexham Park Hospital robots to tackle ‘serious drug error’, the robots called Tom and Jerry are used for dispensing medicine
to the patient. The hospital believes that they will remove human error that often
picks wrong drug , however some patient worry that the robots can’t input to the
useful information like human do.
I am the pharmacy student, so I have heard this news before
and I thought that they were the big step of pharmaceutical development. It
reminds me that I used to go to medication storage room of Osot Sala which is
the drug store of Chulalongkorn University, and studied the process of finding,
picking and packaging drug before sending to the counter. It is very difficult
to follow this process but the pharmacist must do it fast because it isn’t good
to leave patient waiting too long and they must dispense meditation without any mistake.
Consequently, I think the robots will be very useful for helping the pharmacist
to avoid doing mistakes.
In my opinion, what the robots do is reliable because they receive
an online prescription from the doctor directly and scan barcode to save some
details including expiration date. But many people still worry about their safety
because they don’t know the accuracy of robots, as I was worried at first time,
but if they read the news and learn how the robots work, they might change
their mind. Someone needs to understand that after receiving the drug from
robots, the pharmacist will check again and then give it to the patient with
some advice, so using robot is not risk for people.
You might not know that some private hospitals in Bangkok is
using this kind of robots already. And the result of using them is satisfying,
drug error is decreasing. However, the Government Pharmaceutical Organization
GPO did an enormous mistake last year, they put incorrect medicine in package
and sent them to seven hospitals around the country. Some of these hospitals had
prescribed wrong medicine to their patient. Fortunately, there were not any
reports told that people suffered from this mistake. But it is not a problem
that we can ignore because it is related to human’s life. And although the GPO was ordered to stop drug production for a while but how can they guarantee the
patient safety after that? If the robot can eliminate drug error but why the mistake is still
happened?
__________
Reference
Wexham Park Hospital robots to tackle ‘serious drug error’. (2014, May 13). BBC News Berkshire. Retrieved
May 14, 2014 from http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-berkshire-27375557
I think that It’s really good idea to apply the advanced technology for benefiting our life. However, I’m curious that if the problem doesn't cause from robots but from human error, how should we deal with it? According to GPO that you mentioned, I think that the problem came from human error, didn't it? Although we have a magnificent robot, the human errors still remain. So I’m wondering that we should do something to cope with the human error right?
ReplyDeleteEliminate the humans? (I mean from the industrial and service processes, not from existence.) Is more technology the solution here, too, so that less and less humans are employed to do things?
DeleteTom and Jerry remind me of a very old cartoon with Tom Cat and Jerry Mouse. Tom and Jerry is my favorite cartoon when i was young. If we give a wrong code to robots, they will make a serious mistake too. I think the robots can help the pharmacist if we use them correctly
ReplyDelete