The pharmacy provides services to patients and staff on all wards and departments within the Trust, the supply of medicines and information being the principal services we provide. Medicines are dispensed as either outpatient or inpatient prescriptions, discharge prescriptions, to individual patients. We also provide a ‘top-up’ service to the wards which replenishes the stock items held on the ward.

We provide a drug information service to our own hospital and as we specialise in mothers and babies, we also receive numerous queries from members of the public and from other hospitals around the region and the country regarding the taking of medication in pregnancy and babies. We also provide information to managers on drug usage and expenditure. The department is very clinically focused, the pharmacists have an input into the prescribing of drugs, liasing with the medical staff.

These pharmacists also work very closely with the Neo-Natal nursing and medical team. As a department we are very IT orientated, and have implemented the pharmacy module of the hospital information systems, which gives us previously unavailable access to other departmental information.

We also make use of the hospital radio link network enabling us to work from outside the department and send drug requests to the pharmacy across the network. This has enabled us to speed up some of our working practices. We are currently looking at implementing electronic prescribing.

The pharmacy service normally provides a Monday to Friday 8.30am to 5pm service, with an on-call pharmacist available
out of hours.

lwhpharm@yahoo.com