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Showing results for tags 'Prescribing'.
Found 327 results
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Content ArticleThe General Medical Council (GMC) has updated their ethical guidance on Good practice in prescribing and managing medicines and devices.
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Content Article
Top medication errors reported to ISMP in 2020
Anonymous posted an article in Coronavirus (COVID-19)
One of the most important ways to prevent medication errors is to learn from errors that have occurred in professional practice and to use that information to identify potential risk points or practices to prevent similar errors. This presentation from the Institute of Safe Medicines Practices (ISMP), looks at the top medication errors reported in 2020. -
Content ArticleHealth information technology (HIT) provides many benefits, but also facilitates certain types of errors, such as wrong-patient errors in which one patient is mistaken for another. These errors can have serious patient safety consequences and there has been significant effort to mitigate the risk of these errors through national patient safety goals, in-depth research, and the development of safety toolkits. Nonetheless, these errors persist.
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Content ArticleMost primary care clinicians are well aware that the climate crisis is a health crisis and of the immediate and significant health co-benefits of climate action, such as through reduced air pollution. However, when it comes to taking action, in our experience many clinicians do not make the link with clinical practice. This is perhaps a result of extrapolating from actions to reduce one’s personal carbon footprint in areas like energy, waste, and transport. Yet, the majority of general practice’s carbon footprint results from clinical activity. In this article, Aarti Bansal and Grant Blashki focus on clinical practice and outline six practical steps that primary care can take towards sustainable healthcare that align with evidence-informed and person-centred practice.
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Content ArticleWould you like to help our healthcare professionals understand how they can continue to use a new approach for prescribing safety in general practices? This research is looking at making prescribing safer in general practices in England and is jointly conducted by the Universities of Nottingham, Manchester, Edinburgh & Dundee. GP surgeries are working with pharmacists to use a computer programme to help find patients who may need their medicines reviewing. People from patient and public groups are invited to say what they think about continuing this service across the country in the longer term. If you choose to take part, this will involve being part of a group discussion on issues relating to continuing the service for medicines safety. You do not need to know about the service before taking part as this will be explained to you. If interested, please contact: azwa.shamsuddin@ed.ac.uk
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Content ArticleThis project includes the design of templates for controlled drugs, Hypnotics/Z-drugs, DMARDs (each orally administered drug has individualized template), NOACs, Warfarin, Lithium and Amiodarone. These templates prompt the user to add compulsory details before the drug can be issued for the first time or for a repeat issue. This has led to better and safer prescribing and potential to identify group of patients who either have not been reviewed or have missed essential monitoring. To avoid visual fatigue templates are short and to the point and a clinician can navigate away by one click if the required fields have been captured recently. Audits of prescribing such drugs has shown better prescribing and more patient involvement in decision making. Read more about this case study on the NICE shared learning database, via the link below.
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Content ArticleAs prescription numbers continue to increase, it is necessary to understand the dispensing errors that can occur and how they may happen. This article is the first of two articles from Phipps et al. on dispensing errors and risk. Reducing risk and managing dispensing errors will build on the ideas proposed in this article.
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Content ArticlePharmacy teams should understand how to minimise the risk and likelihood of dispensing errors, including methods that can be used to evaluate existing processes, as well as how to deal with errors if they happen. This article from Phipps et al., in the Pharmaceutical Journal, builds upon the ideas proposed in ‘Understanding dispensing errors and risk’, and also proposes strategies and methods that should be considered for use in the pharmacy to manage the risk of dispensing errors.
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Explore England's prescribing data
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Medication administration
Every month, the NHS in England publishes anonymised data about the drugs prescribed by GPs. But the raw data files are large and unwieldy, with more than 700 million rows. OpenPrescribing.net are making it easier for GPs, managers and everyone to explore - supporting safer, more efficient prescribing. Source: OpenPrescribing.net, EBM DataLab, University of Oxford, 2020 -
Content ArticleA review on the extent of medication errors and recommendations to reduce medication-related harm in England. The Short Life Working Group report makes recommendations for a programme of work to tackle medication error and improve medicine safety.
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Content ArticleA joint National Patient Safety Alert has been issued by NHS Improvement and NHS England national patient safety team, Royal College of General Practitioners, Royal College of Physicians and Society for Endocrinology, regarding the introduction of a new Steroid Emergency Card to support the early recognition and treatment of adrenal crisis in adults.
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Medicines safety: NHS online learning index
Claire Cox posted an article in Medication including labelling
This alphabetical index helps NHS staff with an interest in the safe use of medicines to quickly find e-learning or videos that have already been produced by the NHS, government agencies, or professional bodies. -
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Antibiotic Resistance & Patient Safety Portal
Claire Cox posted an article in International patient safety
The Antibiotic Resistance & Patient Safety Portal (AR&PSP) is an interactive web-based application that was created to innovatively display data collected through CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN), the Antibiotic Resistance Laboratory Network (AR Lab Network), and other sources. It offers enhanced data visualizations on Antibiotic Resistance, Use, and Stewardship datasets as well as Healthcare-Associated Infection (HAI) data. -
Content ArticlePrescription drug errors are a leading source of harm in health care, resulting in substantial morbidity, mortality and healthcare costs estimated at more than $20 billion annually in the US. Currently, clinical decision support (CDS) alerting tools – computerised alerts and reminders – are widely used to identify and reduce medication errors. However, CDS systems have a variety of limitations, including that they are rule based and can identify only medication errors that have been previously identified and programmed into the alerting logic. A new study from Rozenblum et al., published in The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, used retrospective data to evaluate the ability of a machine learning system – a platform that applies and automates advanced machine learning algorithms – to identify and prevent medication prescribing errors not previously identified by and programmed into the existing CDS system.
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Content ArticleHSIB has identified a significant safety risk posed by the communication and transfer of information between secondary care, primary care and community pharmacy relating to medicines at the time of hospital discharge. A reference event was identified that resulted in a patient inadvertently receiving two anticoagulant medications at the same time, possibly causing an episode of gastrointestinal (digestive tract) bleeding. Increasingly, healthcare facilities in primary and secondary care are introducing digital solutions (electronic prescribing and medicines administration (ePMA) systems) to improve medicines safety. However, analysis of the reference event identified how ePMA systems can create their own risks, risks that will need to be addressed as these systems become more widespread. Other risk factors relating to prescribing and the discharge of the patient, including medicines reconciliation, availability of pharmacy services and weekend working, were identified during the investigation.
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Content ArticleSince the emergence of the opioid epidemic in the United States at the beginning of the 21st century, more than 400,000 Americans have died as the result of an opioid overdose. As of 2018, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration estimates that more two million people have an opioid use disorder. With the rate of opioid-related inpatient stays and the number of opioid-related emergency department visits continuing to rise dramatically in the US, hospitals have the opportunity to make a major impact in reducing morbidity and mortality related to opioid use. This document, produced by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, provides system-level strategies that hospitals can implement immediately to address the challenges of preventing, identifying, and treating opioid use disorder.
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Content ArticleLast year, 63 healthcare professionals in England were found stealing controlled drugs and/or providing care whilst working under the influence of controlled drugs. By law, designated bodies must have a Controlled Drug Accountable Officer (CDAO). This is a case study demonstrating the role of the CDAO and safety of controlled drugs.
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Content ArticlePharmaceutical companies use a variety of abbreviations to denote short- and long-acting medications. Errors involving the administration of these medications are frequently reported.
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Content ArticleAHRQ’s new toolkit to improve antibiotic use in acute care hospitals. Based on the experiences of more than 400 hospitals that participated in AHRQ’s Safety Program for Improving Antibiotic Use, the toolkit guides users through its signature 'Four Moments of Antibiotic Decision Making,' a step-by-step approach for doctors to achieve optimal antibiotic prescribing.
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Content ArticleIn 2019, the US-based National Quality Forum (NQF), is convening a new multi-stakeholder expert committee to revisit and build on the work of the Diagnostic Quality and Safety Committee. This report updates a scan done when the National Quality Framework (NQF) diagnostic measures framework first came out in 2017. The assessment of the current state of diagnostic errors measurement, themes that have emerged since the earlier document and new measures that have been published may be of interest to researchers in the UK doing work in this important segment of patient safety work.
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Content ArticleI have worked in the UK NHS as a hospital pharmacist for 13 years, experiencing a variety of specialities before specialising in cancer and education and, more recently, gastroenterology. I am also an avid traveller and have witnessed that, while we are globally connected, populations around the world are not as fortunate as we are in the UK for medicine and healthcare access and as a result are dying of very treatable diseases. This fuelled me to enrol on the Global Health Policy post-graduate masters (MSc). On completing my MSc, an opportunity arose to take part in the Global Health Fellowship and so I began working with Zambian colleagues at the University Teaching Hospital (UTH) and University of Zambia (UNZA), Lusaka, via the Brighton-Lusaka health link. This fellowship is a collaborative project between Commonwealth Pharmacists Association (CPA), Tropical Health and Education Trust (THET) and the Fleming Fund and is an avenue for pharmacists to become more involved in global health and improve medicine usage.
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Content ArticleExamples and recommendations around how to implement some aspects from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society's report: Getting the medicines right.
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Content ArticleTackling antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and Healthcare Associated Infection (HAI) are currently a priority within healthcare and antimicrobial stewardship is an essential element of national and local programmes to address AMR. The aim of this webinar is to provide an overview of antimicrobial stewardship (AS), its importance in tackling Healthcare Associated Infection (HAI) and how pharmacists can contribute.
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Content ArticleThe pharmacy contribution to antimicrobial stewardship document focuses on the pharmacist’s role as part of a multidisciplinary approach in tackling the challenges of inappropriate use of antibiotics. The recommendations in this policy have been produced in order to contribute to wider efforts in meeting the challenge set by the UK Government in 2016 of reducing inappropriate antibiotic prescribing by 50% by 2020.
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Content ArticleGood patient-pharmacist communication improves health outcomes. There is, however, room for improving pharmacists’ communication skills. These develop through complex interactions during undergraduate pharmacy education, practice-based learning and continuing professional development. The aim of the research, published in Systemic Reviews, is to understand how educational interventions develop patient-pharmacist interpersonal communication skills produce their effects.
