Head Office Commitment to Quality-Related Event Reporting in Community Pharmacy

Abstract

Community pharmacy is a key area in which to implement patient safety and quality improvement practices, due to the significant volume of prescriptions dispensed in the community. While considerable research exists that looked at medication safety within hospitals, there is a growing body of knowledge regarding safety issues in the community setting. Incidence rates in Britain, Denmark and the United States suggest that between 23 and 26 medication errors and near misses occur for every 10,000 prescriptions dispensed.1-3 In Britain, the primary cause of medication incidents was determined to be misreading the prescription. 1 These findings were echoed in Denmark, with the majority of errors occurring in the transcription phase, including the wrong strength, wrong medicine and wrong dosage.

Expansion of patient safety regulatory requirements in community pharmacy in Canada: The Melissa Sheldrick effect?

“…6 In the subsequent years, numerous studies by the SafetyNET-Rx team demonstrated the value of these practices in changing the structures and processes of patient care and improved perceptions of safety by pharmacy staff. [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] A recently published study evaluating the first 7 years of the mandatory anonymous reporting by 301 Nova Scotia pharmacies documented 131,031 quality-related events reported by these pharmacies, 98,097 of which were medication related. 17 Despite Nova Scotia's pharmacy regulatory authority adopting these comprehensive patient safety requirements in 2010 and the evidence supporting their use, there was little uptake across the country until very recently.…”