A System Dynamics Approach to Workload Management of Hospital Pharmacy Staff: Modeling the Tradeoff between Dispensing Backlog and Dispensing Errors

OCCUPATIONAL APPLICATIONS We adopted a system dynamics approach to simulate dynamic factors affecting dispensing backlog and dispensing errors in a hospital pharmacy system. This approach allowed us to simulate diverse scenarios (hospital winter pressures and differing staffing arrangements) and to understand the potential unintended impact of rework due to dispensing errors, which is often missing from model-based approaches. The results revealed the impacts of key factors (high workload, staff capacity, backlog, incoming prescriptions, errors, and delay) on system performance and safety within hospital pharmacies. Use of a system dynamics model can provide pharmacy management with practical tools to understand the unintended adverse effects of dynamic factors that contribute to dispensing backlog and errors.

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