Good Authentication Practice for Hospital Dispensaries

Aegate continues to pioneer and lead the industry in medicines verification by launching GAP™ , the definitive Good Authentication Practice standard for ensuring excellence in medicines verification.
Central to this is the charter below which provides the steps necessary for practice in authentication:

  1. Manual authentication should be performed by an accredited pharmacy technician or pharmacist as the last step in the checking process
  2. Robotic authentication should be favoured over manual where possible using 2D data matrix scanners to reduce the risk of dispensing without authentication whilst facilitating lean working.
  3. Medicines identified as falsified or recalled should be quarantined for the inspection of suitably qualified professionals to investigate
  4. Medicines should be dispensed in full packs and only be removed from original containers for administration to the patient
  5. If dispensing from split packs does occur, the original container should not leave the dispensary until its entire contents are used
  6. Medicines that are removed from split packs should be verified by scanning the 2D data matrix on the original container and transferred into a suitable container
  7. Medicines authentication services should have an option to differentiate between a product dispensed elsewhere and a product dispensed in house
  8. Once a national medicines serial code repository is established and in operation, any medicine returned to pharmacy, intended for re-use, outside of their original container should be re-verified by contacting the medicines authentication service citing the product batch number and expiry date
  9. If a medicine has been authenticated but is no longer required for the current dispensing process, there should be an option to highlight the medicine on screen and click undo to return the product to stock
  10. Authentication should be incorporated into departmental procedures. Incidents where medicinal products leave a dispensary without authentication should be classed as a dispensing error
  11. Authentication of extemporaneously prepared medicines should occur at product assembly before final product preparation by a qualified member of staff
  12. Authentication procedures must include checking that the tamper-evident seal has not been altered.

The GAP protocol was developed through the activities of the FMD Academic Pilot Project at Oxford which is the first live FMD medicine verification process through a Hospital Dispensary service serving multiple hospitals . Aegate wishes to acknowledge the leadership of Bernard Naughton and the NHS Staff who supported him in designing these GAP Guidelines. These GAP guidelines are currently submitted to an academic peer-reviewed journal pending formal publication.

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