Specialist Pharmacy Collaborative: Time critical medicines quality improvement collaborative (28 May 2025)

Summary

Acute and mental health NHS Trusts are invited to submit an expression of interest, to be among a cohort of sites actively participating in the first Safer Use of Time Critical Medicines Quality Improvement Collaborative.

Deadline to submit an expression of interest: 9am on Monday 30 June 2025.

Content

Background

There are known risks associated with time critical medicines, and harms continue to be reported due to people not getting these medicines on time.

The Safer Use of Time Critical Medicines Programme has been running since 2024, led by the NHS Specialist Pharmacy Service (SPS). The programme aims to identify interventions that effectively reduce harm from time critical medicines, share this learning and support replication of practice across the NHS. The programme is part of NHS England’s Medicines Safety Improvement Programme (MedSIP).

An appreciative inquiry was undertaken between October 2024 and March 2025. This enabled us to gain a detailed understanding of improvement work that has already been carried out and what has been learnt from this, with a focus on what worked well.

Benefits of taking part

As part of the collaborative, you will receive supported delivery of a local quality improvement project designed to reduce the number of delayed and omitted doses of time critical medicines experienced by patients. This can also lead to:

• improved quality of life for people on time critical medicines
• improved patient experience
• reduced patient harm, including death
• reduced length of stay for people on time critical medicines
• reduced number of medication errors
• reduced staff time spent on remedial actions after an omitted or delayed dose

The collaborative aims to equip trusts with the skills and knowledge to deliver high quality projects, improving the safe use of time critical medicines in the local organisation. We will share knowledge that we have gained from the programme so far. This will include interventions shown to have an impact on reducing omitted and delayed doses of time critical medicines.

By participating in this collaborative, it will take you on an improvement journey in medicines safety and leave a legacy of skills in your project team and organisation. These skills can be used not only to continue this improvement project into future years but also to develop other local improvement projects.