Hospital experience is seldom a happy experience. While navigating between Out Patient Department, Wards, Operation Theatre, ICUs & Emergency; patients and relatives need to make necessary stop-overs at the pharmacy to purchase prescribed medicines. The Apollo Hospital in Hyderabad operated nine such over-the-counter pharmacies in their flagship property; each attached to a major department. The intention behind operating a number of units was to minimize the discomfort in making the stop-over.

The departmental pharmacies were cramped, overstaffed and always overcrowded. While the initial brief was to revamp each of the individual pharmacies; peak-time footfall distribution revealed that the areas would have to be quadrupled. Instead of designing nine properties, the brief evolved into developing a conveniently located central pharmacy. To encourage footfalls, it was imperative that the design must be easy to locate, visually transparent and encourage intuitive navigation.

Furthermore design must become an enabler where the interactions must go beyond servicing prescriptions, to a more meaningful exchange around life, health and wholistic well-being. The key objective thus, in designing the pharmacy was to ‘de-pharmacise’ the typical Hospital Pharmacy. The underlining goal was that design should ease stress and create opportunities for meaningful interactions. Exchanges which in-turn shall reinforce that ‘life-is-priceless’.
Today, visiting the Pharmacy is an uplifting experience. Every touch-point in the visitor’s journey reinforces the value of choices that we make for our well-being.

Design: Figments