The workplace holds a rapidly deployable, self-sufficient field hospital including a medicine cache valued at $80,000. The cache is rotated through the affiliated hospital pharmacy when they have less than 12 months to their expiry. Rotations are done regularly due to the short expiry dates of stock coming from suppliers. A senior pharmacy technician is employed two days per week at a cost of $13,024.80 per annum to manage this cache.

To demonstrate the associated cost savings of employing a pharmacy technician to manage a medication cache.

Every month, the technician extracts items with less than a year expiry from the stock control system and compares these dates with that of the stock held in the pharmacy. All items with a better expiry date are rotated as long as there is sufficient turnover to ensure use before its expiry. Automatic recording occurs of items rotated, items discarded, and their costs are used as key performance indicators (KPI).

Over a 12 month period, $52,803 worth of stock was rotated. On average, 48 lines and 7,619 individual items were rotated monthly with a value of $4,061.83 (range $0-$8,820 per month). During this period, there were 2 months where no rotations occurred due to staff changeover and annual leave. 10 lines of medicines at a value of $4,041 were discarded over this time period. The two main reasons for discarding were that the medicine was not a pharmacy item or was not used in a large enough quantity to allow rotation.

The equivalent of four times the technician’s wage was saved over 12 months. This illustrates striking cost savings gained by efficient, timely rotations and the cost benefits of employing a technician.