LEAVING hospital with the right medication should soon be a quick and easy process thanks to new robots in the pharmacy.

The pharmacies at both the Royal Blackburn Hospital and Burnley General Hospital are set for a £1 million overhaul during the next three years.

The robotic equipment will be installed at Blackburn within two months and in Burnley later next year.

By 2010, health bosses hope to be able to extend the scheme, with hand-held computers for doctors, nurses and pharmacists sending instant messages to the automated system and ensuring prescriptions are prepared as quickly as possible, ready for checking by a qualified chemist.

At the moment, patients regularly have to wait on the wards up to four hours after they have been discharged, waiting for prescription drugs to take home with them.

But the new automated system, coupled with a campaign to encourage patients to bring all the medicines they are taking to hospital with them, could slash the waiting and free up hospital bed space.

It coudl also save the hospital trust an estimated £1.3million.

The robots will replace dispensing pharmacists in the drug room, picking items off the shelves to order, allowing pharmacists to spend more time with patients.

The government is keen for all hospitals to use a robotic system, and it has already been introduced in a handful of trusts including East Midlands and Liverpool, where bosses are already working towards bringing in the hand-held computers for staff.

Joe Quinn, director of pharmacy for East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust, said the new systems would mean patients could keep their medication with them at all times in locked bedside cabinets, have it constantly updated during their stay, and be free to leave hospital almost as soon as they have recovered, complete with all the medication they need.

He said: "The system is being fundamentally changed from being tailored around a central pharmacy to being patient-centred, with quicker, highly-accurate dispensing.

"The most important thing for patients to do is make sure they bring all their medication with them to hospital, so we can do a proper assessment and make sure they have all the drugs they need when they go home.

"Doing that will help stop patients getting confused over which medicines to take, and in most cases stop them having to hang around after discharge to get the prescriptions they need."