Reduce the risk of dispensing errors

Any pharmacist's biggest nightmare is the thought of a dispensing error which causes serious injury to a patient. Hopefully this will never happen to you. And yet it is unrealistic to expect any pharmacist to dispense 100–200 scripts a day over a working life and not make an error. Mistakes can and do happen.

Our objective must be to use every method available to minimise the chance of error. One such tool is the use of a scanner in the dispensing process to verify that what has been prescribed, and intended to be dispensed, is what has been selected off the shelf. Our statistics indicate that nearly 50 per cent of dispensing errors occur because of the wrong selection of the product or strength.

Pharmacy Boards have recognized this fact and the use of scanners in the dispensing process is either compulsory in Pharmacy Acts or included in Regulations.
If your dispensing software does not accommodate the use of a barcode scanner you should put pressure on them to  modify their software to do so.