Improving patient waiting time: A quality initiative at a pharmacy of a public hospital in United Arab Emirates

Abstract

High patient waiting times may lead to poor patient satisfaction. This quality improvement project aimed to improve waiting time in polyclinic pharmacy at a public hospital in United Arab Emirates so as to ameliorate patient experience and satisfaction with pharmacy services. A multidisciplinary team evaluated the problem and proposed optimizing the use of hospital information system Cerner® (Malaffi) through electronic prescription (ERX) monitor in retail medication manager module for pharmacy. The project involved sending the prescription electronically to the pharmacy immediately after it was generated in physician’s clinic so that the pharmacy team starts working on it even before the patient reached at the counter for collection. The intervention resulted in reduction of waiting time from 21.5 to 4 min as per Qlik View Customer Satisfaction tool results. The patient satisfaction survey suggested that 82% of patients were either extremely satisfied or satisfied with the reduced waiting time.