The Pharmacy Department in Tallaght Hospital is one of the busiest pharmacies in the country. Our dispensary stocks about 4,000 medicines. As well as dispensing over 200,000 prescriptions each year, we prepare 12,000 doses of chemotherapy and other intravenous medications in our Aseptic Unit. Most of this work is done by our team of pharmacy technicians, who also manage the medication stocks at ward level to make sure that nurses have the medicines they need on the drug trolley when they go on rounds.
If you are admitted to hospital, our clinical pharmacists review your medication history to ensure continuity of care and prevent errors. They continue to play a very important role in your care time in hospital, working as part of the medical teams to ensure you get the best possible treatment, and to make sure you are discharged home smoothly. We aim to make sure that when you are discharged, your GP will receive a full report on your care within 48 hours, including the prescription. We transmit this information electronically to GPs who have the Healthlink system.
Teaching and Research are an important part of our role. We are affiliated to the School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences at Trinity College Dublin and twelve of our pharmacists hold official appointments at the University. We teach pharmacy students at undergraduate and post-graduate level as well as training Pharmacy Interns in the pre-registration year. Our research programme is designed to provide us with knowledge about the way medicines are used in the hospital, so that we can change practice in order to do a better job for you, our patients. We see our research as the bridge from today’s good practice to tomorrow’s better practice. Everyone in the department is committed to following the evidence that research provides. This can mean having to make big changes to the way we work. In 2015, led by the results of our research, we completely re-aligned the clinical pharmacists and started them working more closely with the medical staff in their teams, instead of the old way, which was to have pharmacists attached to wards.
We are committed to patient safety and this year, with the support of the CEO, Mr David Slevin, we launched a campaign called Zero Harm: Know Your Medicines, Part of this programme aims to assist you, the patient, with managing your medication throughout your admission, hospital stay and discharge.
