Pharmacy
The goal of Saint John’s Health Center’s Pharmacy Department is to provide all patients with the highest quality pharmaceutical care in an atmosphere that educates each patient, fosters mutual communication, and invites shared respect. Services provided by the Pharmacy Department run the gamut and include drug interaction monitoring, patient care rounding, medication teaching, renal drug monitoring, therapeutic drug monitoring, drug order review, and drug information support for health care providers.
At Saint John’s, the Pharmacy Department operates two pharmacies: a main pharmacy situated in the new Chan Soon-Shiong Center for Life Sciences and a surgical satellite pharmacy, which is located in the South wing near the main hospital building. The main pharmacy, which serves inpatients, outpatients and emergency patients, is open 24 hours every day. The satellite pharmacy serves only surgical patients and is open Monday through Friday from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Through the two pharmacies an estimated 120,000 doses of medication are dispensed to patients each month.
The Pharmacy Department is state of the art and offers a unit-based clinical pharmacy program, in which pharmacists spend considerable time out on the unit floors doing order entry and clinical work—including dose adjustment and renal failure assessment. New orders are then checked and filled in the main pharmacy and sent back up to the patient floors where they originated.
The department is fully automated and capable of ensuring maximum patient and operational safety at all times. Safety measures include Omnicell, a software program used to monitor controlled substances and other frequently used drugs. A pain control pharmacist who completes rounds five days per week to evaluate patient-controlled analgesia and provide consults also is available. The turnaround time for the department to fill prescriptions is two hours for most patients and 30 minutes for urgent requisitions.
The Pharmacy Department consists of 16 full-time pharmacists and six per diem pharmacists, as well as technical and support personnel who work together to assure that patients receive the highest quality pharmaceutical care possible. Eight pharmacists are on site during the day and at least one is available in the pharmacy during the evening hours.
At Saint John’s Health Center, thousands of patients are treated every year. That translates to nearly 1.5 million doses of medication dispensed annually, a significant number for any community hospital. With numbers such as those, hospitals must have confidence in their staff and their capabilities. Nowhere is that confidence more evident than in the Pharmacy Department.
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