September the 18th, 2020 – Is there anything quite as bad as being riddled with the flu and having to stand in a pharmacy among others, coughing, sneezing and sweating as you wait for the pharmacist to get you your medicine from the somewhat mysterious back room? In the continental Croatian town of Varazdin, that soon won’t be necessary. Meet the Croatian automatic pharmacy.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 17th of September, 2020, the Varazdin County Pharmacy is investing 1.7 million kuna in the automation of its work processes, meaning that the facility located on Kolodvorska Street in Varazdin will be the first county pharmacy in Croatia to introduce the automatic receipt, storage and dispensing of medicines.
The contract was signed by the director of the pharmacy, Zvezdana Petrovic, and the company Gama Futura from Zagreb, according to a report from Vecernji list.
The automated warehouse will have computer control, a robotic arm, and exit locations to which drugs will be delivered. The central pharmacy in Kolodvorska organises on-call duty, so the Croatian automatic pharmacy machine will provide its services 24 hours a day throughout the entire year.
”In practice, this means that the pharmacist will no longer have to go for medicines to various micro-locations in the pharmacy warehouse and bring them to the workplace for dispensing, but instead, the medicines will be delivered from the automated warehouse via connected software modules to an exit location near the dispensing site.
Thanks to this, the pharmacist, as a highly educated healthcare professional, will have more time to talk to the users of the services and for professional counselling for those who have questions about their medication. At the same time, service users will have the service delivered to them more quickly,” said the pharmacy’s director, Zvezdana Petrovic. The most common prescription drugs will be delivered by the automatic Croatian pharmacy, but direct sales and counselling will remain as they are.
”While in Europe such a concept is already common in pharmacies, in Croatia, the automated warehouse has so far been introduced only in one private pharmacy in Slavonia,” they noted from Varazdin County. Completion of the automatic Croatian pharmacy is expected early next year, as Varazdin County’s Deputy Prefect Robert Vugrin announced.
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