A new website forms part of a drive by the community pharmacy Patient Safety Group to discuss the safer delivery of medicines.

The group has developed a detailed discussion paper featuring its insights into what makes medication delivery services as safe as possible. It can be found at www.pharmacysafety.org – a new dedicated website.

To produce the paper, two members of the Patient Safety Group shadowed their delivery drivers for a day to gain a better understanding of the potential risks that can arise, to patients, their families and to delivery drivers themselves, when delivering medicines to people’s homes.

José Moss, Deputy Superintendent at Boots UK, Patient Safety Group member and lead author of the discussion paper commented: “Shadowing our delivery drivers was a thoroughly enlightening experience. We gained a true insight into the complex needs of some of our delivery patients and the unique challenges that our delivery drivers face in their day to day work.

“This paper comes at a time when many community pharmacy teams are building more robust policies and procedures into their pharmacy practice around safeguarding children and vulnerable adults, in line with the new quality criteria. We have found through our experiences that often the most vulnerable of our patients are those who are less mobile or who have substantially fewer social interactions due to being home-based.  These are often the patients who receive their medications via a delivery service so we feel it is timely that we publish our insights into providing the safest possible service for these groups.”

The group emphasises that  the paper is not intended to be seen as guidance or best practice. "It is intended for information purposes and to stimulate a discussion," its statement reads.   "The community pharmacy Patient Safety Group would like to encourage pharmacies which do offer, or are looking to offer, medication delivery services to take a look through its insights and consider how their services compare with what it has found."

Access the paper here.