Hub and spoke dispensing: safety and sociotechnical pliability

Over the course of the last year, the Department of Health has looked at the use of hub and spoke dispensing systems for community pharmacy in England, a technology which some view as an inevitable extension of electronic prescription transmission in primary care. In a hub and spoke system, medicines required for a primary care prescription are put together at a remotely located warehouse and then transported to a spoke site, such as a community pharmacy, where they can be collected by the patient. The economies of scale that such a model offers support the use of robotic dispensing.