Communicable Disease Center Pharmacy's prudent response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the State of Qatar

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present the effective response of Communicable Disease Center in Hamad Medical Corporation as the first and the central healthcare facility facing the COVID-19 pandemic in Qatar. The pharmacy leadership team designed new strategies to handle the new workload quantitatively and qualitatively. Outpatient pharmacy expanded the scope of service to manage all refill requests for COVID-19 cases in 12 quarantine centers across Qatar. Inpatient pharmacy automation adopted new workflows to maintain efficient infection control methods after considering that the new workload was four times higher than the pre-pandemic workload. This also highlighted the efforts that the Clinical Pharmacy Service made during the pandemic and its significant role in raising awareness and education to prevent prescription errors despite the increase in the overall number of orders from approximately 7000 Rx per month to approximately 22,000 Rx per month. The outcomes showed that the prudent response plan paid off successfully during the pandemic.