Time and motion study of medicines dispensing in Pharmacy Outpatient Department, Hospital Sultanah Aminah, Johor Bahru (HSAJB)

Patients' waiting time was introduced to pharmacy outpatient department (OPD) in 2009 as a key performance indicator (KPI) in the Ministry of Health Malaysia (MOH). Patients are supposed to get their medications within 30 minutes in order to achieve 100 % patients' waiting time. A retrospective study was done to study the time taken required for each process to accomplish as well as to determine at which process took a longer time. This study had been done on November 2012 until January 2013. The data were collected by using random sampling technique from pharmacy OPD with permission from the authority. It took almost three months to collect all the data. Then, the data was analyzed using Microsoft Office Excel. Our study subject was the pharmacy staff in outpatient department of Hospital Sultanah Aminah, Johor Bahru (HSAJB). The focus of the study is to relate the time taken for each process with the patient's waiting time by calculating the average time for each process. Based on the research findings, average time taken for 1 prescription during filling and labelling process was 1.24 minutes respectively. At peak hour which is 11 am - 1 pm, the time taken to complete both processes seems to exceed the average time as the number of patients increase during that time. Besides that, the gap on going the process can be divided into three groups which were gap between screening and filling process (Gap 1), gap between filling and labelling process (Gap 2) as well as gap between labelling and dispensing process (Gap 3). Out of three gaps, Gap 3 hold the highest percentage of 49% with total time of 1706.27 minutes followed by Gap 2 with the percentage of 33% (1141.35 minutes) while the rest 19% (659.05 minutes) were from Gap 1. Apart from that, it was reported that out of 15.92 minutes of average total waiting time per prescription, only 3.35 minutes (21 %) were the total processes while the rest 12.57 minutes (79%) were the total gaps. Therefore, this project seems to be important as we recognized at which process took a longer time to accomplish which finally may contribute to excessive patients' waiting time.