Get Parkinson’s medications on time: the Leeds QI project (16 July 2020)

Summary

This article in Age & Ageing describes a quality improvement project at Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust (LTHT) that aimed to achieve timely Parkinson’s disease medication administration.

Content

Medication delays can risk life-threatening complications for patients with Parkinson's disease, including choking, aspiration pneumonia and neuroleptic malignant syndrome. In 2016, the spouse of a patient with Parkinson's disease wrote to LTHT to highlight that multiple medication delays and omissions had occurred during his recent admission. In response, LTHT formed a multidisciplinary quality improvement Collaborative to ensure patients with Parkinson's disease received their medication on time.

Thanks to the project, between January 2016 and June 2020:

• mean delays in the time from admission to first dose of medication dropped from over seven hours to under one hour
• the mean percentage of omitted Parkinson's disease medications reduced from 15.1 to 0.6%.

The authors highlight the following factors as reasons for the project's success:

• Interventions were simple
• Frontline teams took ownership to make changes quickly
• The spouse who wrote the original letter took a leading role in the Collaborative and was able to bring a unique perspective.

Further reading

Keeping patients with Parkinson’s safe in hospital: 4 key actions for staff (blog)

Medication delays: A huge risk for inpatients with Parkinson’s (blog)

Parkinson's Disease awareness video