Medication Divider

The medication divider system is a product and visual system that enables confidence, efficiency, and accuracy of clinicians during the medication selection process in Auckland Hospital.

Medication rooms within each ward at Auckland Hospital do not currently have consistent systems to categorize and organize medication. This makes the medication selection process inefficient and creates room for error while selecting drugs for patients. With limited resources, nurses and clinicians of each ward have attempted to create temporary solutions. However, the nature of temporary solutions has contributed to a cluttered and stressful workplace. This Medication Divider System enables tidy behaviors, alphabetizes drugs, and creates clear physical and visual divisions between letters giving nurses and clinicians confidence during the medication section process.

Throughout this project Clinical Lead Pharmacist Medicines Governance & Informatics of ADHB (Rob Ticehurst), orthopaedics charge nurse of ADHB (Kate Bridgeman), myself and various other nurses of Auckland City Hospital collaboratively researched, designed, developed, and tested the medication divider system.

Together we designed a system that consists of 3 parts. A colour system, a physical divider, and medication lists. The colour system helps to clearly differentiate the three key types of drugs within a medication storage room; oral drugs, injectable drugs and patient drugs. These colours are further applied throughout large banners, physical dividers and drug lists.

The divider system was designed with a hierarchy of information, to provide clinicians with information when they need it. An example of this can be seen in the physical design of the divider. The form puts forward the letter because in most cases clinicians will first look to the letter to find the desired medication. It is only when the medication appears to be missing from the shelf when they will refer to the medication list to confirm it is out of stock or the room does not stock a particular drug. This is why the medication list housing is near the rear of the shelf.

The divider as a product allows is simple and allows flexibility. Current temporary labelling-hacks are often fixed, take up lots of shelf space, or require nurses to move labels or boxes to keep drugs under the right letter. The design of the divider only uses 3mm of shelf space per unit, is a physical barrier between letter patient sections and is a tool to help create room where needed.

The design was rolled out across 60 wards of Auckland District Health Board over the 2020-2021 period.