Pharmacy

Barstow Community Hospital’s clinical pharmacists are an integral part of the patient’s medical team. Barstow Community Hospital’s pharmacy is not a retail pharmacy, but instead provides safe and progressive pharmaceutical services to care for patients. This care includes both actively providing medication education and answering any questions patients might have.

Pharmacy staff work with other hospital departments to provide a multi-disciplinary, team-based approach to medicine to evaluate possible drug allergies, medication history and general medical conditions to determine optimal pharmaceutical solutions for recovery. Two examples of how this medical evaluation may benefit patients:

• adjusting renal doses to ensure kidney safety;
• ensuring patients are not on any unnecessary medications that can lead to a fall, especially if patients are at high risk for falls.

The hospital has installed a technologically advanced pharmaceutical dispensing and monitoring system designed to enhance collaboration between pharmacists and nurses. The medication management system contains features intended to increase patient safety and speed the delivery of drugs to patients. The system electronically generates patient medication lists and can display the status of orders in the pharmacy’s electronic order. It also has advanced reporting capabilities and warning systems that alert clinicians to potential medical errors prior to dispensing medications. Utilizing the medication management system can help ensure patients receive medication on time and in the correct order, even in an emergency setting.

Barstow Community Hospital takes its medication stewardship responsibility very serious. Stewardship programs include:

• a coordinated antimicrobial stewardship program that promotes the appropriate use of antimicrobials (including antibiotics), improves patient outcomes, reduces microbial resistance, and decreases the spread of infections caused by multidrug-resistant organisms;
• and, opioid stewardship program that promotes appropriate use of opioid medications, improves patient outcomes, and reduce misuse of opioids.