Medical Services

Progressive Care with Compassion.
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Pharmacy

The Valley County Health System Pharmacy plays a crucial role in your or your loved one's diagnosis and treatment. Our staff (a full-time pharmacist and two full-time pharmacy technicians) strives to provide patients with the best level of pharmaceutical care. They deliver inpatient medications, as well as stock and prepare outpatient intravenous medications. Medication dispensing is provided to our patients, but prescription services are not available to the general public.

Our AcuDose-Rx dispensing system ensures medication is administered correctly. This system ensures staff and patients that the right person gets the right medication in the right dose at the right time. Medications are housed in a medication cabinet cabinets with numerous drawers that are interfaced to a computer that contains each patient's medication orders. When medication needs to be administered, nurses log into the system and the drawer containing that medication opens – ensuring the nurse gets the correct medication. If a medication has not been given, the system will alert the nurses to the omission.

The Pharmacy Department provides the following clinical services: antibiotic monitoring, renal and hepatic monitoring, drug interaction monitoring, therapeutic duplication monitoring, and medication order review. 

Medication reconciliation is performed by our dedicated staff. This process involves comparing the patient's hospital profile to their pharmacy list, to their verbal list, to a family member's list, or any other source providing a medication list. Any descrepancies found are documented and sent to the provider for a final review. The provider then decides what medications are to become the official medication list for the patient. Once decided upon, the medications are entered into the patient profile by the pharmacy staff and the provider is notified for ordering. This reconciliation is done to avoid medication errors such as omissions, duplications, dosing errors, or drug interactions. Medication reconciliation helps ensure patient safety by obtaining the most accurate list of a patient's medications for the hospital file.