Seminar M6 – Patient safety and compounding technologies

The compounding of medicine is an often overlooked aspect of patient safety within health care systems. However the preparation of ready-to-use drugs or the manufacturing of drugs designed for special patients groups both contribute to patient safety and may generate risks. 

 

Improved patient safety should be expected when medicines are compounded in hospital pharmacies compared to preparations being made at the wards as hospital pharmacies contain professional competencies within drug manufacturing and comply with Good Preparation Practice (GPP) or even Good manufacturing practice (GMP). The most important areas of improvement and awareness regarding the production of drugs and patients safety should be identified in close collaboration with doctors, nurses and risk managers in order to continuously improve both the product range and the design and the individual product.

 

Drug production should however also be considered as a possible source of generating medication errors. The control and the implementation of improved production processes is the responsibility of the hospital pharmacist. Technological developments can support both improved quality and efficiency within hospital pharmacy production. An important question is, do we consider patient safety when selecting equipment and designing processes? And is this possible at all?

 

 

• To demonstrate where hospital pharmacy production can contribute to patient safety and where special awareness has to be paid;

• To illustrate approaches for evaluation of patient safety and risks when implementing manual, semi automated or automated production technologies. 

 

 

After the presentation the participant should be able:

 

• to specify patient safety issues to consider when designing medicine within the hospital pharmacy;

• to outline the main patients safety issues to consider when selecting production technologies and designing processes drug production.