GREAT Western Hospital has two new members of staff – Wall-E and Eve, the first robots to join the hospital’s 3,300-strong team.

The pair started work yesterday, marking the completion of a £350,000 programme to enhance pharmacy services at the hospital.

Their employment comes on the back of research showing robots can grab the right drugs off the right shelves quicker than any human.

The programme was designed by the GWH NHS Foundation Trust to cut the time patients wait to receive prescriptions.

Swindon Local Involvement Network is delighted with the two new-age additions.

Link spokesman Geraint Day said: “This sounds like a very good idea and if it works – which it sounds like it will – it really could speed up the prescription process and reduce drug errors.

“This certainly looks like an example of the hospital really listening to what patients have to say and trying to improve their experience.

"Of course, not only is it freeing patients up for discharge but enabling staff to give more face to face patient care on the wards.”

Wall-E and Eve use a sophisticated infra-red scanning system linked to computer software – similar to a barcode system – to log and store drugs.

When patients or staff take a prescription to the pharmacy, the robot scans the prescription code and can immediately locate where it is on on the shelves.

A robotic arm then picks up the drug, it is placed on a conveyor belt and sent across to the dispensary ready to be checked by staff before being given to the patient.

Sarah Davis, the pharmacy operations manager at GWH, is leading the project.

“The idea behind installing Wall-E and Eve is to speed up prescription discharge times and free up time for pharmacy staff to go onto wards and support direct patient care where they are needed,” she said.

“The pharmacy robot is helping reduce waste by improving stock control and reducing the costs of expired drugs, and also helps us minimise any prescription errors.

“As with any process in a hospital there is small risk of human error but the robot reduces this by sorting and retrieving the drugs using the barcode technology, followed by dispensing and checking by trained staff, so it makes the whole process even safer.”

The hospital hopes that by reducing the time patients wait for their prescriptions, they will be able to be discharged from hospital more quickly and spend time at home instead of on the wards.