An apparatus for the person-related provisioning of medicament-dispensers with administering units for medicaments—tablets, coated pills or capsules—which are to be taken by patients daily in a defined chronological sequence, wherein the medicaments are arranged in an arrangement within the medicament-dispenser which is correlated with the ingestion times, said apparatus having:
- a) a store of medicaments which is designed for making available a plurality of different medicaments which are contained in standard blister packs in which a trough-shaped cup which is covered with a blister film is present for each administering unit, wherein the said standard blister packs are arranged in vertical stacks which are guided, in a form-locking manner and so as to be capable of sliding vertically, within magazine shafts which are assigned to the various medicaments individually;
- b) a de-blistering device for the separating, automatically-occurring removal of the medicaments from the particular blister pack, wherein the blister film can be subjected, in the region that covers the cup of the medicament selected, to a scratching or cutting pre-treatment which facilitates the subsequent removal of the cover, after which the removal of the medicament and, after that, its transfer to the dispensing unit take place;
- c) a transporting apparatus by means of which the medicament-dispensers can be supplied to a delivery apparatus by means of which the separated medicaments can be fed into receiving compartments in the medicament-dispenser which are assigned to the administering units, wherein
- d) there are provided, for the automatic provisioning of the medicament-dispensers, electronically controllable drives for the de-blistering device, the delivery apparatus and the dispenser transport, for controlling which drives use is made of an electronic control unit which generates, from a system for processing machine-readable, person-related data which can be read and processed in a defined correlation with the transport of the dispensers, the control signals which are required for the provisioning sequence;
- and
- e) a transporting apparatus is provided, by means of which the medicament-dispensers can be supplied to the delivery apparatus;
- in which:
- f) the modules forming the installation each comprise a blister-pack shaft, a punching apparatus and a delivery apparatus and are arranged so as to be capable of being mounted, along the transporting apparatus i, at distances from one another which, viewed in the direction of transport of the medicament-dispensers, correspond to the distance between the receiving compartments in the dispensers or to an integral multiple of the said distance;
- g) at their lower end, the magazine shafts are delimited by a slide which receives the lowest standard blister pack in a stack in each case, shifts into this receiving position after a standard blister pack which has been emptied is removed, and can be pushed out of the said position again and into the de-blistering and provisioning station;
- h) the slides are constructed in two parts in each case and have a guide part, for horizontally displaceable guidance, which is guided so as to be displaceable at least within the particular magazine shaft, and also a window part which is designed to receive the standard blister packs in a form-locking manner;
- and
- i) the slides can be shifted out of the particular magazine shaft, transversely to the transporting apparatus of the medicament-dispensers, to an extent such that it is possible to carry out, in a de-blistering region, the scratching pre-treatment of the covering films of the standard blister packs, and also the removal of the medicament from the blister cup which has been opened, and the delivery of the medicament to the particular medicament-dispenser.