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A large-scale automated medicines dispensing facility in Leeds which was conceived more than five years ago has today been opened to independent pharmacies.

HubRx, which operates the 40,000 sq. ft. hub at Logic Leeds business park, said it was “the UK’s first large-scale automated dispensing facility designed for independent pharmacies” and will help them cope with increasing patient demand for prescriptions, allowing pharmacy teams to deliver more clinical services.

HubRx said the facility uses “barcode and optical recognition technology to ensure highly accurate assembly” and automation technology from Knapp and PMR partner RxWeb.

“Each prescription item is labelled in under two seconds,” HubRx said. “Once dispensing is complete, HubRx returns the bagged, labelled and checked medicines to the pharmacy.”

The company said the facility will dispense over 12 million prescription items for independent pharmacies every year. Its availability for independents comes just four weeks after a change in law allowing hub and spoke dispensing between different legal entitles in the UK.

HubRx said the site has dispensed more than 2.6 million prescription items in the last year for its own 35 pharmacies.

“We first began the journey to create HubRx more than five years ago and although the change in legislation to bring these dispensing benefits to independents has been a long time coming, it’s a very proud moment to see the first prescription items for our new independent pharmacy customers coming off the conveyor belt,” said HubRx founder Daniel Lee.

He added: “By dispensing around 60 per cent of our prescription items through HubRx we’ve been able to free-up 90 hours of time in each of our branches.

“To achieve that without our HubRx model, we would have had to increase our headcount considerably or invest in branch dispensing robotics and both come with significant costs. So, we’ve created a third route where the same benefits are available, just without the same level of investment.”