A Kraków hospital has opened a fully integrated automated pharmacy in which robots prepare individual doses of medicines, cancer treatments and clinical nutrition, while pharmacists oversee a digital system designed to track each drug from storage to the moment it reaches a patient.
The new facility has been built at the Ludwik Rydygier Specialist Hospital in Kraków and uses the Unit Dose model, under which medicines can be prepared and identified for individual patients rather than supplied to wards only in bulk.
The Małopolska regional government describes it as the first fully automated Unit Dose hospital pharmacy of its kind in Poland and the third in Europe.
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Its central feature is a closed and digitally monitored medicine-distribution system intended to reduce errors and improve the traceability of drugs used throughout the hospital.
A robot prepares doses for individual patients
Instead of staff manually assembling every dose needed by a hospital ward, medicines can be entered into an automated storage system and then prepared for a particular patient.
The Unit Dose system packages individual medicines and identifies them electronically, allowing staff to monitor their route through the hospital.
That means a medicine can be tracked from its arrival at the pharmacy, through storage and preparation, to its eventual administration.
The system is intended to reduce the risk of patients receiving the wrong medication or dose.
It does not remove pharmacists from the process.
The hospital has a pharmacy team of around 60 people, according to the Małopolska regional government, with automation intended to support their work rather than replace clinical supervision.
Robots will prepare cancer medicines
Some of the most advanced machinery is designed for drugs where precision and staff safety are particularly important.
The pharmacy includes a cytorobot for preparing cytostatic medicines, which are commonly used in chemotherapy, as well as robotic equipment for sterile medicines and antibiotics.
It also contains automated equipment for producing parenteral nutrition — specially formulated nutrition administered intravenously to patients who cannot receive enough nutrients through the digestive system.
That can include some cancer patients and people recovering from major gastrointestinal surgery.
Preparing cytotoxic cancer medicines also presents an occupational risk to pharmacy staff because of the potency of the substances involved.
The regional government says the closed robotic systems should reduce pharmacists’ direct exposure while allowing doses to be prepared more precisely.
Medicines can move through the hospital within minutes
The new pharmacy also connects to a pneumatic-tube distribution system.
Hospital authorities say medical products can therefore be sent rapidly from the pharmacy to teams involved in diagnostics, surgery and other treatments.
The pharmacy itself occupies a purpose-built, three-storey building with around 2,678 square metres of usable space.
The equipment listed by the hospital includes an automated medicine warehouse, a horizontal carousel system, the Unit Dose distribution system, a cytotoxic-drug robot, an antibiotic robot, several medicine mixers and 48 ward medicine trolleys.
Devices and technology were sourced from several European countries, including Finland, Spain, Italy and Belgium.
Major investment in cancer treatment
The pharmacy forms part of a much larger modernisation programme at the Rydygier hospital focused particularly on oncology.
The Małopolska regional government puts the total value of that programme at more than PLN 150.1 million.
More than PLN 124.6 million comes from Poland’s National Recovery Plan, with PLN 19.2 million provided by the regional government and around PLN 6.3 million from the hospital itself.
The investment covers more than the pharmacy alone, so that PLN 150 million figure should not be interpreted as the cost of the pharmacy.
The hospital says the new pharmaceutical infrastructure is intended to support patients receiving chemotherapy, medicines under specialist treatment programmes, pain treatment and clinical nutrition.
Is it really Poland’s first automated hospital pharmacy?
The claim requires some qualification.
The Rydygier hospital and Małopolska authorities describe the Kraków facility as Poland’s first fully automated Unit Dose pharmacy with a closed, integrated medicine circuit.
It is not, however, the first Polish hospital pharmacy to use robots or automated dispensing technology.
In June, Warsaw’s Children’s Memorial Health Institute officially opened a modernised hospital pharmacy using automated storage, a pharmacy robot, automated ward cabinets and a Unit Dose system.
The distinction being made in Kraków is therefore the breadth and integration of the automation — including medicine storage and distribution, individual-dose dispensing, robotic preparation of cytostatics and sterile drugs, clinical nutrition and end-to-end tracking — rather than the first appearance of a pharmacy robot in Poland.
The Małopolska authorities also describe the Rydygier facility as only the third fully automated pharmacy of this particular type in Europe.
Not a pharmacy for walk-in customers
Despite the name, the facility is not a normal retail pharmacy where members of the public collect prescriptions.
It is an internal hospital pharmacy responsible for preparing, managing and supplying medicines used to treat patients admitted to or cared for by the hospital.
The automation therefore operates largely behind the scenes.
For a patient, the most important change is intended to be greater control over exactly which drug has been prepared, for whom, in what dose and how it moved through the hospital before administration.
For pharmacists, the hospital says it should mean less repetitive manual handling and less direct exposure to hazardous substances.
The project also illustrates a broader move towards automation in Polish hospital pharmacy.
The technology does not eliminate the need for pharmacists. Instead, it shifts more of their work away from manual logistics and towards verification and pharmaceutical oversight while machines handle an increasing share of storage, packaging and drug preparation.
