Our pharmacy team celebrated the opening of our new on site pharmacy dispensary for all NELFT services at Barley Court on the Goodmayes hospital site last week.

The celebration was held at Barley Court where the NELFT pharmacy team, along with guests from our executive management team, came together to welcome their Lloyds colleagues to the new site. 

The pharmacy team would like to say a huge thank you to all the teams and individuals who have been involved in the opening of the new dispensary including finance, estates and procurement. A special thank you goes out to Colette in the pharmacy team for coming up with the idea of having an on site pharmacy and to Arun and Pav for working so hard with their teams to lead the mobilisation of the service.

Rahul Singal, NELFT's chief pharmacist, said:

"I am really pleased that this vision has become a reality for us here at NELFT, so that we can provide a better quality and value medicines supply service to our patients. I am so proud of all the work of the teams and individuals across the Trust over the last three years who have been part of the journey, and persevered throughout. I am looking forward to see how the partnership develops as we work closer together as a single team across two organisations. Thank you to everyone involved!"

What will the new dispensary do?

The new dispensary opened on Monday 4 July and is operated by Lloyds Pharmacy, as per our previous pharmacy arrangements. We are excited that the new on site dispensary will support closer partnership working with Lloyds as well as help to provide a more responsive service as a result of being co-located where the majority of acute admissions and HTT services operate. Having the dispensary on site will also provide greater opportunities to support training of pharmacy apprenticeships.

This new location will help to reduce medicines waste which in turn will increase best value from medicines and support sustainability. The new dispensary stores and delivers medicines to over 70 locations across our inpatient and community services, dispensing roughly 15,000 items per month.

The new dispensary is open Monday to Friday, 9am-5.30pm and Saturdays 9am-1pm. The dispensary will stock medications for wards and clinic sites, medications for inpatients and those attending planned clinic appointments (where receiving medicines from NELFT) and medications on discharge. The dispensary operates a delivery model and pick up of medications directly from the site is not possible, however, the service will not be able to deliver directly to patients. 

Please note, it is not possible to collect medicines directly from the dispensary by either staff or patients. This dispensary is not licensed to dispense FP10 prescriptions, these would need to be dispensed by local community pharmacies.