Safe medication initiatives — sustaining good practice
By David Cousins, MRPharmS
This article, the last in the “safety of
medicines in practice” series, highlights examples of good
practice in medication safety and how these initiatives can be
sustained and extended. Studies that have employed different methods
of measuring
safe practice are also described
|
|
Safety of medicines series |
This article as a FULL TEXT PDF (60K) |
David Cousins is
head of safe medication practice at the National Patient Safety
Agency |
Controlled Drugs cupboards are often small and overcrowded |
SUMMARY
Previous articles published in this series indicate that progress has been
made in improving safe medication practice in hospitals.
Articles published early in the series focused on how improving the labelling
and packaging design of medicines can make them safer. Another article described
how NHS purchasing groups can help reduce medicine-related errors by ensuring
that the medicines they purchase have been assessed for their error potential
and by purchasing medicines with safe packaging designs wherever possible.
The need for accurate and complete reports of medication incidents to enable
the NHS to identify error trends and disseminate safety information was also
described.
Later in the series, a medicines governance team from Northern Ireland described
the benefits of establishing a network of six pharmacists, one in each of the
larger acute hospitals in Northern Ireland, to increase the levels of medication
incident reporting, manage incident data, develop and implement medicines safety
initiatives and provide medication safety education for staff.
Finally, the potential of using failure modes and effects analysis to evaluate
the safety of medicine packaging was discussed.
It is apparent that much is being done in the safe medication practice field,
but how can these initiatives be extended and sustained and what else needs
to be done to improve safe medication practice?
|
Hospital
Pharmacist