The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 277 No 7428 p630
25 November 2006

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NHS Tayside patient safety team wins top team award

Developing safer systems for medicines use is part of the work that led the patient safety team at NHS Tayside to be presented with the top team award at the Scottish Healthcare Awards 2006 held in Edinburgh earlier this month. NHS Tayside is one of four hospital trusts that have been participating in the Safer Patients Initiative since January 2005.

The initiative, funded by the Health Foundation and supported by the US-based Institute for Healthcare Improvement, assists hospitals to test ways of improving health care safety on an organisation-wide basis. In two years, the four hospitals have halved their number of medical mistakes.

Gordon Thomson, principal clinical pharmacist, medicine and cardiovascular, at NHS Tayside, has been looking at issues such as reconciling patients’ medicines when they are admitted to hospital and improving systems for using anticoagulants. “These are not new problems but the Safer Patients Initiative uses different methodology, which is widely used in the US, to address these issues,” he said.

Twenty hospitals across the UK have been selected to receive £165,000 plus a support package of similar value in the second wave of the initiative. It will test ways of making care safer by improving infection control, management of drugs and communication between staff teams and patients.