Pharmacy

Tianjin Eye Hospital’s Department of Pharmacy is a health-sector “Integrity Department” announced to the public by the Tianjin Municipal Health Commission, integrating pharmaceutical services, research, and teaching, and comprising outpatient pharmacy, inpatient pharmacy, clinical pharmacy, and other departments. Since the hospital was founded in 1924, successive generations of colleagues in the Department of Pharmacy have continuously explored, carried on the tradition, and pursued improvement, forging ahead with resolve to ensure rational clinical medication use. The Department of Pharmacy focuses on routine drug supply, starts from clinical services, improves the quality of the hospital’s pharmaceutical services, broadens the scope of disciplinary development, and strengthens work in clinical pharmacy, pharmaceutical emergency response, pharmaceutical research, and team building.

In recent years, with the hospital’s strong support, development of the pharmacy workforce has progressed further. The department currently has 18 employees, including 1 chief pharmacist, 2 deputy chief pharmacists, 6 supervising pharmacists, and 9 pharmacists. Those with a master’s degree or higher account for 44.4%, including 1 doctorate holder and 7 master’s degree holders; another 5 people have obtained licensed-pharmacist qualifications.

For a long time, the Department of Pharmacy has adopted a service philosophy centered on patients and oriented toward clinical practice. In 2023, the first hospital preparation, “Mu Huang Gao”, was successfully approved; 2 other preparations are undergoing subsequent R&D, and construction of the traditional Chinese medicine preparation room is also under way, with the aim of providing patients with hospital preparations that are highly effective, low-priced, and indispensable. At the same time, the department established a sound system for selecting new drugs and optimized the range of medicines used in the hospital. In 2024, with the hospital’s support, the department strengthened the development of information technology and automation, equipped itself with devices including a fully automatic medication-dispensing machine and intelligent medicine cabinets, and completed the transformation into a smart pharmacy, providing patients with more convenient and reassuring services.

In education and teaching, since 2013, the Department of Pharmacy has held national/provincial/municipal-level continuing education programs every year as scheduled, building a good platform for exchange in primary healthcare services. The Department of Pharmacy currently has 1 master’s supervisor and serves as a joint postgraduate training base and undergraduate teaching and practical training base for Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, an undergraduate internship base for the Clinical Medical College of Tianjin Medical University, and also undertakes medication training for clinical physicians. Since 2007, it has trained more than 30 undergraduates in pharmacy/traditional Chinese pharmacy, and many had their graduation theses rated excellent.

Departmental Professional Level

The Department of Pharmacy has several research directions at a leading level in ophthalmic pharmacy in China. It has successively secured 1 Tianjin Municipal Health Commission scientific research project, 1 project supported by the Open Fund of the State Key Laboratory of Medicinal Chemical Biology at Nankai University, 1 Tianjin Municipal Health Bureau Science and Technology Fund project, and multiple other clinical-pharmacy-related research projects at various levels. In recent years, it has published more than 20 academic papers, including 3 SCI-indexed articles and more than 10 articles in core journals. At the same time, it has led and organized national-level continuing education courses, conducted training in specialized pharmaceutical services such as ophthalmic chronic-disease medication therapy management (MTM) / pediatric ophthalmic pharmaceutical services, delivered reports and academic lectures at the National Ophthalmology Conference on many person-occasions, and actively drafted expert consensus statements on ophthalmic medication and other areas, promoting the development of ophthalmic pharmacy as a discipline.

Outpatient Dispensing Implements the “First-Prescription Responsibility System”

The outpatient pharmacy has optimized its service procedures and implemented the “first-prescription responsibility system.” All medicines prescribed by doctors for patients, whether Western or traditional Chinese medicines, can be collected in full in a single visit at any window upon presentation of the receipt, with no need to queue a second time.

Provision of a “Decoction on Behalf of Patients” Service for In-Hospital Agreed Prescriptions

To address the difficulty of decocting medicines at home, the hospital specifically added an automatic decocting machine and assigned professional pharmacy personnel to strictly follow the decoction procedure in providing a service for decocting in-hospital agreed prescriptions on behalf of patients. This service saves patients’ valuable time and has won their praise.

The Inpatient Pharmacy Provides Quality Service through Fully Automatic Medication Dispensing

The inpatient pharmacy has introduced an advanced automatic medication-dispensing machine. Using medication-order information transmitted through the backend system, the machine automatically dispenses, packages, and seals the medicines, and automatically prints medication information (patient name, drug name, dosage, and administration time, etc.) on the medication bags. Compared with traditional manual medication dispensing, fully automatic dispensing can reduce medication contamination, significantly increase speed, reduce errors, and greatly improve work efficiency.

Specialized Clinical Pharmacy in Ophthalmology

In order to better implement the work tenet of “everything centered on the patient”, our hospital established a medication consultation center in March 2018. The clinical pharmacist team established a complete consultation procedure to provide discharged patients and outpatients with continuous, professional pharmaceutical services.

The main tasks include providing professional guidance and assessment regarding patients’ ocular and systemic medication issues; establishing “ophthalmic medication consultation” and popularizing general medication knowledge; reporting adverse drug reactions, etc. Several pharmacists in the department have already attended the “Clinical Pharmacist Training Program” organized by the School of Pharmacy of Tianjin Medical University, and 2 of them successfully completed the National Health Commission’s clinical pharmacist training; this will play a positive role in advancing our hospital’s clinical pharmacy work.

Since 2019, the department has gradually begun providing specialized pharmaceutical services such as ophthalmic chronic-disease medication therapy management (MTM), and clinical pharmacy services have gradually developed toward specialization and standardization. Clinical pharmacy work has had a lasting and far-reaching impact on exploring the path for pharmaceutical services to shift from supply assurance to professional technical services, as well as on the development of pharmacists and the improvement of pharmaceutical-service quality.

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