Patients should use one pharmacy for all their medicines, says WHO
Patients should be encouraged to use a single pharmacy for all their medicines and for information about them, the World Health Organization has recommended.
As part of a set of nine
safety solutions launched last week, the WHO
recommends that systems should be developed to collect and document information
about all medicines a patient is taking and generate a list of these
at all stages of treatment. The list should include prescription and
non-prescription medicines, vitamin and nutritional supplements, potentially
interactive food items, herbal preparations and recreational drugs. The
source of patients’ medicines should also be included and, where
appropriate, community pharmacists should be involved in
collecting and validating this information.
To this end, the WHO recommends encouraging patients and families to
use a single pharmacy, not only as a provider of medicines but as a source
of information about medicines.
Patients and their caregivers should also be encouraged to maintain an
accurate list of all medicines patients are taking, the WHO says. It
suggests that consideration should be given to developing community systems
to support this.
The WHO’s
nine safety solutions involve tackling problems with
- medicine names
- patient identification
- patient hand-overs
- body site
identification
- electrolyte solutions
- medicine accuracy at care
transitions
- catheter and tubing connections
- injection devices
- hand hygiene
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