| Objective: To analyze the experience and insufficiency of using pharmaceutical location encoding for pharmaceutical care in a newly established hospital pharmacy department for Wuhan Designated Hospital for COVID-19, to provide experience reference for the newly established hospitals in emergency situations such as public health emergencies. Methods: In Wuhan designated hospital for COVID-19, four-dimensional encoding method was used for coding the location number. The method, combined with the hospital information management system, was used for the storage, outgoing and inventory of drugs. Through the method of memory field hypothesis, the number of fields that pharmacists need to remember before and after location management was compared. Six pharmacists were randomly divided into two groups, control group holding the warehouse out list without location coding，and experimental group holding the picking list with location coding. At different task stages (the 7th day of initial work, the 27th day of middle work and the 47th day of later work), the time of pharmacists to complete the target deployment task and allocation error rate were observed. The time needed for 20 pharmacists to complete the drug inventory and the inventory error rate were compared before (2d) and after (5d) location code management.Results and Conclusion: Drug location coding management can improve the efficiency of drug allocation and inventory, and reduce the risk of allocation errors.After using drug location coding, the number of memory fields needed by pharmacists decreased from 624 to 60, the inventory time reduced from 3.17h to 1.33h, and the inventory error rate decreased from 7.98% to 1.83%. In different task stages, the deployment time of the experimental group was significantly lower than that of the control group(95.20 min vs. 31.33 min in the early stage，71.67 min vs. 22.67 min in the middle stage，69.67 min vs. 22.67 min in the later stage), and the deployment error rate of the storage location coding management was significantly reduced at the beginning of the task(1.45% vs. 5.80%).At the same time, we reflect on the management loopholes in the drug location coding, such as the unreasonable design of "total drugs", the lack of preparation principles of special drugs such as high-risk / fine anesthesia / easily confused and near effective period, the lack of mobile codes and emergency plans, and put forward corresponding solutions, in order to provide reference for the information management of drugs in public health emergencies. |