Global patient safety initiative to involve UK pharmacists
A patient safety initiative involving seven countries, including the UK, has been launched this week by the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Patient Safety, the World Alliance for Patient Safety and the Commonwealth Fund.
The “Action on patient safety (high 5s) initiative” aims
to reduce significantly or eliminate five safety problems in selected
hospitals in each country over a five-year period. The National Patient
Safety Agency has been chosen to oversee the programme in the UK.
The five areas to be targeted are: continuity of medication errors; high
concentration solution drug errors; patient care handover errors; wrong
site/wrong procedure/wrong person surgical errors; and hand hygiene practices.
Prevention of continuity of medication errors will involve medication
reconciliation — creating a complete and accurate list of current
medicines and communicating this to the next provider of care. Errors
in solutions with high drug concentrations will be tackled by improving
availability, access, prescribing, ordering, preparation, distribution,
labelling and verification and by planning administration.
Helen Glenister, deputy chief executive of the NPSA, told The Journal that the agency will be working with the chief medical officer, the Department
of Health and the international collaborators in mapping out how the
initiative will be taken forward in the UK. “We would see that
the whole initiative would need to involve the relevant stakeholders
to whom the solutions are focused. So for these two solutions [prevention
of continuity of medication errors and prevention of high concentration
drug errors] it would be pharmacists.”
The WHO collaborating centre will work with participating countries (Australia,
Canada, New Zealand, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the US) to
develop standardised operating protocols for each of the five solutions. |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal
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