An innovative tool which prioritises high-risk inpatients and streamlines workflows has put the Mackay HHS in the spotlight at Australia’s largest scientific pharmacy conference.
Mackay HHS pharmacist Neve Munro presented at the Advanced Pharmacy Australia Medicines Management 2024 conference in Adelaide last month about the development of the Risk Assessment Tool (RAT) which has revolutionised inpatient care at Mackay Base Hospital.
The system enables pharmacists to triage patients based on acuity and is proving so successful, it is now being trialled by other Queensland HHS sites including Townsville University Hospital, Sunshine Coast Hospital and West Moreton Health.
The Risk Assessment Tool (RAT) was developed by a small team at Mackay Base Hospital led by pharmacy director Ron Nightingale and including Neve, clinical informatician Robert Knight and deputy directors Sarah McLennan and Kathleen Cox.
With limited clinical pharmacists available to manage an increasing workload, the department faced an urgent need to optimise its resources, Neve said.
The RAT was created to address this challenge by enabling pharmacists to prioritise high-risk patients more effectively and allow the department to maintain safe, efficient and equitable patient care to ensure the most critical cases received the necessary attention.
“We started work on this tool in October last year, generating31 clinical indicators after a literature review. These indicators were then localised for the Mackay population,” Neve said.
“Robert was the mastermind behind pulling data from ieMR and Hibiscus to create the dashboard which shows us our high risk, medium risk and low risk patients for each day.
“This helps us target our work and benefits staffing because it reduces the time for pharmacists to manually prioritize patients which can take up to 1.5 hours a day.
“The RAT decreases the time wasted, increases efficiency and really allows us to see the more high-risk patients.”
The department restructured its workflow and technician workforce to support this model once the RAT was rolled out in February after significant validation and trialling.
“We did a staff satisfaction survey and overall there’s been a significant improvement in pharmacy camaraderie, which is due to transparency in workflows which has helped improve the level of teamwork,” Neve said.
As part of her residency training program through Advanced Pharmacy Australian, Neve submitted an abstract about the quality improvement project and was selected to give the 11-minute oral presentation about the RAT at the national conference in Adelaide.
Earlier this year, the MBH pharmacy team won the Hospital Team Innovation Award at the Advance Pharmacy Australia Queensland branch awards for the RAT and was a finalist in the national awards at the conference last month.
As a junior pharmacist, it was rewarding and satisfying to be part of an innovative team which has developed an important quality improvement project which was now being utilised by other health services.
“It’s fantastic to see a regional hospital in Queensland mentioned so many times at a national conference like that; and to know that a hospital this size is helping lead the way in terms of quality improvement and increasing efficiencies,” she said.
“It’s great to see you can still make big waves in healthcare, even from a regional centre, which can have an effect on the care delivered in other centres.
“With other Mackay HHS facilities starting to use ieMR, we can now also pull data from the rural sites now so potentially that will give us more oversight – there’s a lot more things we can do and hopefully, more projects we can work on in the future.
“This is just the start.”
