The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 268 No 7190 p384
23 March 2002

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Pharmacy at the centre of patient safety [more]
Funding fiasco [more]

Pharmacy at the centre of patient safety

Any health care professional would accept that treating a patient safely must be a top priority. That does not, of course, mean that a treatment is without risks; neither does it mean that the correct treatment is always administered. However, it is estimated that as many as 850,000 incidents and errors take place every year in the National Health Service. This is too many by far.

Last summer the Government established the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) to introduce a standardised reporting and logging system. Using this system it is planned that, instead of pushing errors under the carpet and hoping they go away, the NHS will be able to learn from mistakes and try to ensure that they are not repeated. This lack of a robust reporting system means that it is simply not known what percentage of incidents are due to medication errors. So, before recommendations can be made, what constitutes a medication error needs to be defined and a baseline assessment needs to be carried out.

A reporting system has been piloted over the past few months in 26 acute and primary care trusts and is due to be rolled out throughout the NHS in England from April — so the first step has now been taken (see p392).

Even better news for pharmacy is that the NPSA wishes to appoint two pharmacists to senior posts in its management team to help change the culture of dealing with errors and near-misses — recognition of the important role that pharmacists can play in improving patient safety. Part of the process will be to convince the profession that responsibility for errors can be taken without blame being apportioned so that lessons can be learnt more easily. In the current climate that will be no easy task.

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Funding fiasco

It is hard to believe that postregistration training for hospital pharmacists in England could be as ad hoc as it seems, but a news feature in this week's issue (p393) paints a chaotic picture. How easy it is for hospital pharmacists to obtain funds for training depends not only on where they live, but also on how clued up their chief pharmacists are on potential sources of funds.

How can hospital pharmacists hope to develop their careers if they are never quite sure from where funding will come and whether one year's source may have dried up the following year?

At a time when pharmacists are seeing increasing roles for themselves and are taking responsibility for their own professional development, this funding fiasco is completely unacceptable.

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