Redesigning an Outpatient Pharmacy Workflow Using Generic Simulation Modelling to Maximize a Renovation Opportunity

The renovation plans of the outpatient pharmacy at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre presented an opportunity to apply discrete event simulation (DES) to help decision makers estimate the resource and space required for the pharmacy to support prescription volume growth over a ten-year horizon. There is an extensive literature on renovating existing pharmacy workspaces, but research on future capacity planning of pharmacy workspaces is sparse. The trend of increasing spending on prescription drugs underscores the importance of researching capacity planning of outpatient pharmacies. The goal of this study was to develop a generic simulation model that could be reused to plan the future capacity of any outpatient pharmacy. The generic DES was applied to two different pharmacies to explore different workflow configurations and assess the impact of introducing automation. Recommendations were provided to each pharmacy management team on the number of workstations and space required to achieve the target patient wait time.