Pros of the center:
– Reduce the cost by reducing the consumables, machines, pharmacist working hours, and wasting of materials. Also the net cost will be divided on the 3 hospitals budget, which might help you constructing a far bigger place with plenty of machines and workers.
– You will benefit much from compounding automation which is speedy and easier, because you will have a big number of preparations daily. Manual compounding will not be possible.
– Reduce the number of working trained pharmacists.
– You may be able to do batching and standardized TPN for all the hospitals.
Cons:
– You will have a challenge of transporting the preparation NOT TPN, because TPN can be ordered at specific times and delivered at specific times without a problem. The challenge is when you want to transfer many sterile preparations many times daily for many patients. Some of preparations are in syringe form.!!
– You will NOT be able to prepare STAT medications because of the time consumed in transportation. But this can be solved by putting a LAF workbench at a segregated room at your pharmacy (or satellite pharmacies) with BUD 12 hours.
– You still need trained BCNSP with clinical experience at wards for the clinical issues related to TPN prescribing, and approvals.
– Finally and the most importantly, if you have any error or infection at that center, you will propagate it into 3 tertiary hospitals, can you imagine the size of consequences? This may be overcome by sharp and strict quality assurance measures but still errors happen!
I hope I have helped you taking your decision.
Regards,
