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Showing results for tags 'Prescribing'.
Found 327 results
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Content ArticleThe Gosport Independent Panel was set up to address concerns raised by families over a number of years about the initial care of their relatives in Gosport War Memorial Hospital and the subsequent investigations into their deaths. The Report is an in-depth analysis of the Gosport Independent Panel’s findings. It explains how the information reviewed by the Panel informed those findings and illustrates how the disclosed documents add to public understanding of events at the hospital and their aftermath.
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Content ArticleThe Healthcare and Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB) 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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AHRQ Pharmacy Health Literacy Center
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Medicine management
This site provides pharmacists with recently released health literacy tools and other resources from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Pharmacy health literacy is the degree to which individuals are able to obtain, process, and understand basic health and medication information and pharmacy services needed to make appropriate health decisions. Only 12% of adults have proficient health literacy (e.g., can interpret the prescription label correctly). Medication errors are likely higher with patients with limited health literacy, as they are more likely to misinterpret the prescription label information and auxiliary labels. Studies document an association between low literacy and poor health outcomes. -
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 ArticlePresentation from Dr Devina Halsall, NHS England & NHS Improvement Northwest Region, at the 'A New Strategy for Patient Safety - Insight, Involvement, Improvement' conference held in Manchester on the 16 October 2019.
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Content ArticleEvery registered medication has an information insert in its package. This patient leaflet provides information on the product, which includes clinical pharmacology, recommended dose, mode of administration, how supplied, and a large section contains warnings and contraindications, adverse reactions, and precautions. Most of the prescribers do not read the patient information leaflets and do not discuss it with the users, whereas some patients do read it thoroughly. This may create worries and uncertainties resulting in reduced compliance to treatment. With easy access of patients to information on drugs that they use, mainly through the electronic media, it is very important that the text and contents of these patient leaflets are simple to understand and readable. Although information from official health agencies is superior to net-based sources, the patient information leaflets should be improved and become more user-friendly and less frightening.
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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.
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Content ArticleThe Canterbury Renal Unit is situated at Kent and Canterbury Hospital and provides renal services for the East Kent, Medway and Maidstone areas. There are currently 680 transplant patients currently being followed up. There have been a number of immunosuppression related prescribing errors in the surrounding hospitals. Indeed, one such error occurred in the renal unit itself, when a transplant patient had prednisolone inadvertently withheld resulting in rejection of the kidney. Thus, a group of 12 transplant patients attended a co-production group to discuss the problems and potential solutions.
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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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Community PostHi everybody This is Jaione from Spain (we are in the North, Basque Region) and i am a nurse working in collaboration with the Patient Safety Team in our local NHS (Basque Health Service). First of all, I would like to congratulate the team for this hub which i think is a wonderful idea. Secondly, i would like to apologize for the language, since, although i lived in England many years ago, that is not the case anymore and I'm afraid i don't speak as well as I used to. I would like to comment a problem that we encounter very often in our organization which is related to patient's regular medications when they are admitted to hospital. We do have online prescriptions for both acute and community settings but the programs don't really speak to each other so, for example, if I take a blood pressure pill everyday and i get admitted into hospital, chances are that my blood pressure tablet won't get prescribed during my in-hospital stay. The logical thing to do would be to change both online systems so they communicate to each other, but that's not possible at the moment. I wanted to ask whether other systems have the same problem and, if so, if there is any strategy implemented to alleviate this issue. I hope i have expressed myself as clearly as possible. Thanks very much once more for this hub! Kind regards Jaione
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Content ArticlePrescribing errors affect patient safety, but pharmacists and other healthcare professionals can reduce the risk of them occurring. In this article published in The Pharmaceutical Journal, David Cousins and colleagues describe the most important types of prescribing errors, medicines and situations responsible for causing death and severe harm to patients. It also provides advice on how to avoid these errors occurring.
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Drugs.com: UK medication database
Claire Cox posted an article in Medicine management
Drugs.com is the largest, most widely visited, independent medicine information website available on the internet. Their aim is to be the internet’s most trusted resource for drug and related health information. They are trying to achieve this aim by presenting independent, objective, comprehensive and up-to-date information in a clear and concise format for both consumers and healthcare professionals. -
Content ArticleThe Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) is the only US nonprofit organisation devoted entirely to preventing medication errors. In this short video, produced by ISMP in partnership with the Temple University School of Pharmacy, experts discuss current medication safety concerns and offer practical error prevention recommendations.
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Content ArticleThe Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) is the only nonprofit organisation in the US devoted entirely to preventing medication errors. In this video, produced by ISMP in partnership with the Temple University School of Pharmacy, experts discuss medication safety concerns and offer practical error prevention recommendations.
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Content ArticleThe Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England. We make sure that health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and we encourage care services to improve. When CQC inspects health and care services they assess how well these services meet people’s needs. As part of this, they look at how people’s medicines are optimised. Medicines optimisation is the safe and effective use of medicines to enable the best possible outcomes for people. It also looks at the value that medicines deliver, making sure that they are both clinically and cost effective, and that people get the right choice of medicines, at the right time, with clinicians engaging them in the process.
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Content ArticleThis professional guidance has been co-produced by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) and Royal College of Nursing (RCN) and provides principles-based guidance to ensure the safe administration of medicines by healthcare professionals.
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Content ArticleThe digital transformation of medicine is perhaps best exemplified by computerised provider order entry (CPOE), which refers to any system in which clinicians directly place orders electronically, with the orders transmitted directly to the recipient. As recently as 10 years ago, most clinician orders were handwritten. Spurred by the 2009 federal HITECH Act and the accompanying Meaningful Use program, CPOE usage rapidly increased in inpatient and outpatient settings. The vast majority of hospitals in the US and most outpatient practices now use some form of CPOE. CPOE systems were originally developed to improve the safety of medication orders, but modern systems now allow electronic ordering of tests, procedures, and consultations as well.
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Content ArticleFind out more about the work of hospital pharmacists and the wide variety of roles they play in the life of Guy's and St Thomas's Hospital in London. Pharmacists explain the complexities of their work on the ward, the part they play in formulating medicines and in medicines administration as well as dispensaries, highlighting how integral they are to the health of patients and the success of the multi-disciplinary healthcare team.
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Patient Stories: Paul's Story (10 March 2013)
Claire Cox posted an article in Patient stories
In 2007, when Paul Richards was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, his family were stunned by the news. This powerful film from Patient Stories is based on the testimony of Lisa, Paul’s wife, who gives a moving account of the events that led to Paul’s death and explores the effects on their family. -
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About the Community Pharmacy Patient Safety Group
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Community pharmacies
The Community Pharmacy Patient Safety Group provides a forum for community pharmacy organisations, competitors in a commercial sense, to openly share and learn from each other when things go wrong, as well as from other sectors and industries. They are a self-funded, self-created Group with a difference. They consider how learning from patient safety incidents can be applied across the pharmacy network and wider NHS, and then create the opportunities and resources to do just that. -
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JAMA: Time of day and the decision to prescribe antibiotics (December 2014)
Claire Cox posted an article in Culture
This research paper discusses the problem of decision fatigue and how it can impact patient safety. The authors hypothesised that decision fatigue, if present, would increase clinicians’ likelihood of prescribing antibiotics for patients presenting with acute respiratory infections as clinic sessions wore on. -
Content ArticlePrescribing errors in general practice are an expensive, preventable cause of safety incidents, illness, hospitalisations and even deaths. Serious errors affect one in 550 prescription items, while hazardous prescribing in general practice contributes to around 1 in 25 hospital admissions. Outcomes of a trial published in the Lancet showed a reduction in error rates of up to 50% following adoption of PINCER. PINCER is a methodology for reducing medication errors and, thereby, improving medication safety. Using clinical audit tools alongside quality improvement methodology to review groups of patients taking high risk medicines/combinations of medicines, PINCER ensures that any risks are mitigated.
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Content ArticleUniversity Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust (UHL), IBSL (UK) Limited and Santa Lucia Pharma Apps SrL (SLPA), with support from EMAHSN and Loughborough University, have deployed a unit dose closed loop medicines management solution in four wards at UHL and undertaken an 18-month evaluation of the project (OptiMed-ID) in preparation for a Trust-wide rollout.
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Content ArticleThis study from Westbrooke et al. published in BMJ Quality and Safety evaluates the effectiveness of a ‘Do not interrupt’ bundled intervention to reduce non-medication-related interruptions to nurses during medication administration.
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Content ArticlePharmacy Voice’s Patient Safety Group has worked closely with the UK Medicines Information (UKMi) to further develop their risk assessment tool, which is used regularly in secondary care settings, to make the tool more accessible and valuable for community pharmacy teams. The Community Pharmacy Medication Safety Risk Assessment tool is designed as an aid in the systematic identification of potential patient safety issues associated with medicines before their introduction to clinical practice.
