Engineering Care Together

In the bustling corridors of the Changi General Hospital (CGH) Emergency Department (ED), a meaningful collaboration has been cemented between the Centre for Healthcare Assistive & Robotics Technology (CHART) and ED care team. Working together with the rest of the ED care team, Senior Engineer Azreena Zamree and Senior Pharmacist Melanie Teo welcomed members of the smart care team - robots to support the care team with repetitive, manual tasks, allowing the care team to focus on patient care.

Picture this: It's a typical day at the ED, one of the busiest in Singapore. The nurses move briskly between the pharmacy and patient areas, making multiple trips to collect medications for patients. Each journey takes up to seven minutes, which can add up when handling urgent medication orders that must be consumed within a fixed time period.

"You can actually see the stress and tiredness on their faces," Melanie recalls. "The medication nurses would be managing multiple patients, with different medications for their conditions, and their own timelines for consumption."

This is where Azreena's expertise came into play. Working closely with Melanie and the ED team, they introduced new robot colleagues – MEDi to deliver medications, BLANKi to deliver blankets, and EDi to aid patients in wayfinding – at the CGH ED.

Here’s how MEDi works: when nurses need medications, they call in their request. Melanie or other members in the ED pharmacy team prepares the medications, loads the medication into MEDi’s secure compartment, and sends MEDi on its way to the designated area within the ED. MEDi navigates the hospital corridors autonomously, alerts the nurses when it arrives, and waits patiently for them to retrieve their medications before making its way back to the ED pharmacy.

"We also had to figure out MEDI’s working hours and areas, because of the 24/7 environment of the ED," Azreena laughs, recounting early challenges. "There were times in the early phases, when the pharmacists or nurses would call for MEDi, but its path would be blocked, and MEDi would be stuck."

Moments like these became part of the learning curve, and helped the team understand exactly how MEDi needed to work in the busy reality of the ED.

"When MEDi was ready to join the team, it was quite a change," Melanie shares. “Nurses are able to focus more on patient care while MEDi handles the back-and-forth journeys that used to take up so much of their time.”

For the pharmacy team, MEDi streamlined processes. "Now, one person picks up the call, prepares the medication, calls MEDi, loads MEDi, and then the job is completed," Melanie explains with satisfaction.

The impact goes beyond time savings. "What was most memorable about having MEDi is seeing the visible difference on the nurses' expressions and their body language – how they have become less stressed about this."

And here's the heartwarming part: MEDi has been adopted as a fellow member of the Care Team.

Find out more about Azreena's journey in CGH here.