Linked to EAHP Statements

Section 4 – Clinical Pharmacy Services: Statement 4.8
Section 5 – Patient Safety and Quality Assurance: Statements 5.2, 5.3, 5.5

ACPE UAN: 0475-0000-22-012-L05-P. A knowledge-based activity.

Abstract

Medication errors, such as administering a wrong medicine to a patient, are common worldwide. Tackling this problem requires seeking for systems-based risk management approaches in healthcare. These approaches promote proactive management of medication risks by improving every day medication practices and processes in hospitals. One of the strategies to improved safety is learning from identified medication errors and risk prone processes. Another important aspect is to learn from safe operation and situations in healthcare where we succeed and ‘things go right’.

Co-ordinating and promoting medication safety is an important part of a hospital pharmacist’s role. To achieve effective outcomes, it is important to implement evidence-based development activities and share good practices. The process of medication use involves multiple stages and many healthcare professionals with different roles, knowledge and skills, which is why inter-professional co-operation is a key element for success. To put theory into practice, this session presents examples of medication safety activities at the Helsinki University Hospital, Finland.

The interactive part of the session focuses on sharing best practices and designing successful medication safety activities in the participants’ own organisations.

Learning objectives
After the session, participants should be able to:

• To understand the key approaches to modern medication risk management
• To demonstrate how to develop medication safety in hospital settings
• To identify risk management strategies that could be developed in the participants’ own working environments

Educational need addressed
This session will introduce the principles of medication safety risk management in hospitals, and provides examples of risk management practices that could be implemented in European hospitals.

Keywords: Patient safety, medication safety, risk management