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The brilliant basics

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The brilliant basics

Pharmacy is already making good progress on patient safety but there is more to do

A Pharmacy Voice audit shows the importance of prescription interventions. Its chair Claire Ward discusses patient safety

Patient confidence in pharmacy relies upon pharmacists being able to deliver safe and appropriate advice, medicines and services. For everything you do in the dispensary, patient safety must come first. It is, to coin a phrase from the London Olympic Committee, all about the ‘brilliant basics’.

If you master those basics to a high standard, the process of embedding confidence becomes easier. It also helps in the process to make change where this is required too.

Safety is paramount in healthcare and is the focus for this government, coming on the back of the Francis report and a range of other care incidents across the NHS. Pharmacy is already making good progress on patient safety but there is more to do.

This is precisely the reason why Pharmacy Voice, leading the community pharmacy sector, has focussed on patient safety as part of a commitment to support medication safety officers and ensure that staff are always kept up to date with issues that may affect patient safety.

The intervention audit

In the past year over 5,000 community pharmacies have taken part in Pharmacy Voice’s national audit quantifying the number of prescribing queries and incidents and whether these have led to a serious patient incident. The pharmacies recorded 113,471 interventions over the two-week audit period. This suggests that community pharmacy teams could be intervening in a possible 6.6 million prescriptions every year.

That alone shows how important it is that the profession is properly skilled and equipped to support patients. We also know from the audit that medicines shortages remain an issue and are becoming an increasing problem for patients.

The Pharmacy Voice safety group has a number of work streams, including safeguarding vulnerable adults and children and looking at the pharmacy processes in place to reduce the number of incidents involving insulin. Members of the group come from multiple pharmacies as well as independents and together they are able to share their experiences and develop guidance on how to learn from safety incidents. Some of the larger chains have been able to share their internal data so that the sector benefits overall from learning from the errors and incidents of others.

If you read most of the reports following investigations into incidents, the crucial conclusion is often whether professionals have learnt how to change the way they work in order to avoid similar incidents. This is a necessary part of the process to ensure these incidents do not occur again. It is also the learning from incidents that is crucial to developing a safe service to patients.

Decriminalising dispensing errors

Pharmacy Voice has been involved in discussions to rebalance the current legislation which criminalises pharmacists for making dispensing errors and discourages teams from learning from incidents. We hope that the final changes to legislation will recognise, just as in other industries like aviation, that mistakes do happen and the best way to deal with them is to be honest, record and learn from them.

Next month we will be showcasing the lessons that have been learnt from our group at a Pharmacy Voice Patient Safety Forum. Our partners and member associations will come together to share best practice and to hear about the work of our patient safety group. If you want to hear more about our work, then sign up to the Pharmacy Voice newsletter by going to www.pharmacyvoice.com.

Finally, we can improve patient safety and outcomes in other ways, for example by utilising fully the MUR and NMS services so that patients understand their medicines and are supported to take them at the right time and in the right way. Too many incidents, especially those that present in acute settings, are due to patients taking medicines in the wrong way or not at all because they don’t understand why they are taking them. Together with access to and annotation of summary care records, community pharmacy could greatly reduce the potential for harm to patients.

On all of these issues, Pharmacy Voice is campaigning and working across the community pharmacy sector with multiple and independent contractors to create best practice and to share this to support learning and change of culture. Our role is not simply to represent contractors, large and small, but to also provide leadership across the sector, which in turn provides the right environment for community pharmacy to flourish.

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