Pharmacy News: Residents fear bank, pharmacy could cause Calverton traffic glut
Robo-pharmacist readies 350,000 doses perfectly
Your doctor may still be human, but your pharmacist may soon go cybernetic. A robotic drug dispensary system at the University of California, San Francisco is spitting out oral and injected medications for all kinds of patients.
Getting the wrong medication is the greatest risk facing patients under traditional pharmacy systems, according to UCSF Medical Center CEO Mark Laret. But the automated system has prepared some 350,000 doses without a single error, the institution says.
The room-size robots store drugs in dozens of small boxes in a sterile environment. After the 12-hour prescription is received as a digital file, a robot arm finds the correct labeled drug, prepares the proper dose in bar-coded plastic bags on a ring and spits them out into a large bin.
Nurses will begin scanning the bar codes at patient bedsides this year to confirm the doses are correct. Doctors, meanwhile, will begin inputting prescriptions directly into computers next year.
Three of the robots are Robotic IV Automation (RIVA) systems, made by Canada’s Intelligent Hospital Systems. They also prepare hazardous chemotherapy drugs.
Automated pharmacies are increasingly attractive to hospital administrators looking to boost speed and accuracy in drug preparation while reducing labor costs. Other robo-druggists include ForHealth Technologies’ IntelliFill and Swisslog’s PillPick dose packaging and storage system.
Administrators say the robots are freeing pharmacists from the mechanical aspects of their work, allowing them to work with doctors to tailor drugs to individual needs.
That’s all fine and good, but I still think humans have a better bedside manner than machines. I’d even take a holographic image of a human doctor, a la Star Trek Voyager, than a mechanical pill picker. What do you think?
Pharmacists’ challenge to contraception rule heard in court
with discipline if pharmacists refuse to dispense Plan B. Kosirog and Vander Bleek, who owns pharmacies in Morrison, Sycamore and Genoa, have been fighting the rule since.
Kosirog and Vander Bleek said they not only don’t want to stock emergency contraception, they don’t believe they should be forced to help customers obtain it elsewhere. In both their cases, patients can get Plan B from other nearby pharmacies, they said.
New rule worse?
The two said they draw a distinction between emergency contraception and regular birth control pills, which Vander Bleek dispenses. Kosirog said he stopped selling birth control pills a month ago so his patients couldn’t try to take more than the prescribed number in order to use them as emergency contraception.
The pharmacists’ lawyer, Mark Rienzi, said a modified version of the state rule, adopted in 2010, expanded its provisions to over-the-counter emergency contraception. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2005 made morning-after pills available without prescriptions to people 17 and older.
The new state rule prohibits pharmacies from citing moral objections for declining to dispense any drug approved by the FDA, Kosirog said. If Illinois ever legalizes physician-assisted suicide, he said, pharmacies would have to hand out those drugs as well.
Brent Adams, director of the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, said Illinois citizens need access to a variety of medicines sometimes considered controversial, including emergency contraception, psychotropic drugs and drugs to prevent HIV transmission.
A pharmacy owner’s religious beliefs “shouldn’t trump” a patient’s need for legal medicine, Adams said.
Residents fear bank, pharmacy could cause Calverton traffic glut
Calverton residents voiced concern over a proposal to build a bank and pharmacy on Edwards Avenue during a meeting of the Greater Calverton Civic Association Thursday night.
The building proposal comes from a group headed by developer Paul Elliot and the owner of Miller Environmental Group, Jim Miller, who also built the gas station next to the Riverhead Charter School on Route 25 in Calverton. The developers, who filed under the name 1998 Peconic LLC, are seeking a use variance from the Riverhead Town Zoning Board of Appeals because neither a bank nor a pharmacy is permitted under the site’s Industrial C zoning.
They discussed the project at a Feb. 24 ZBA hearing, and the ZBA has yet to rule on the issue.
The plans call for a 13,852-square-foot pharmacy and a 4,092-square-foot bank on the vacant 3.29-acre lot directly south of the shuttered Village Crossroads restaurant on Edwards Avenue. The entrance on Edwards Avenue would be about 500 feet south of the intersection with Route 25.
The pharmacy would not be open 24 hours, as was incorrectly stated at the ZBA meeting.
The two main points of concern raised by some residents who spoke at the civic association meeting were traffic and the fact that the proposal is not permitted by zoning.
“It looks lovely but it’s going against the master plan, which gets me angry,” Kathy Lindstrom said.
Her husband, Hal, reminded the town’s comprehensive master plan was designed to keep retail on major roads like Route 25 or Route 58.
“Once you start getting off those roads, what’s to prevent other uses from coming in that are not permitted in that zoning?”
Ms. Lindstrom also pointed out that the Edwards Avenue/Route 25 intersection was given a grade of F by the state Department of Transportion in terms of traffic flow.
But Mr. Elliott stressed, as he had at the ZBA hearing, that the bank and pharmacy are less intensive uses than those permitted in the Industrial C zone, and that in the past, they have proposed uses that are permitted by the zoning — including a lumberyard and propane storage facility — and those met with opposition.
Chris Tartaglia, an engineer for the applicant, said that banks and pharmacies are not uses that people usually go to as their primary destination, meaning that this traffic would be on the road already, heading somewhere else, and then stopping at the bank or pharmacy along the way.
He said no one is going to come from far away to go to the bank or pharmacy because there would likely be banks and pharmacies near their homes.
Resident Robin Gibbs said pharmacies in Riverhead Town, such as the CVS pharmacies in Wading River and Riverhead, do draw a lot of traffic.
But Mr. Tartaglia said there is a demand for another bank and pharmacy.
“We have tenants interested who are going to invest a lot of money to put a bank and pharmacy here,” he said.
At the ZBA hearing, he said those are the only uses seeking to locate on the property because the property isn’t big enough for many of the permitted uses.
The project also will generate about $120,000 in tax revenue, Mr. Elliott said.
He told a reporter after the meeting that he had expected a mixed reaction to the proposal, but said such feedback is necessarily to be good neighbors.
What is developing as a sort of hamlet center at the intersection already includes a school, post office and the vacant restaurant.
The applicants would not identify potential tenants because no deals have been signed, they said.