Synergy Satellite: Barcoding the single dose of drugs to improve patient safety

 

 

 ACPE UAN: 0475-0000-15-004-L05-P. A knowledge based activity.

 

 

 

In hospitals, individual treatments are prepared in the pharmacy or on the ward and are administered by nurses to the patients. A complete and unambiguous identification of the drug up until the moment of administration is a key element of a safe dispensing procedure. Unfortunately, when drugs are dispensed in multiple dose blisters, they have to be split during drug dispensing, and, as a consequence, some information may be absent from the resulting dose and an accurate control at the bedside is no longer feasible.

 

Many hospitals already have implemented, or are in the process of implementing computerised prescription systems, which allow for a final control just before the administration of drugs to patients, via a bar-code system contained in the singled dose pack. This final check is performed electronically by comparing the prescription with the actual prepared drugs. This significantly increases the patient’s safety (reducing medication administration errors by over 40% according to some studies), as the human controls are not without failure (performance ≈85%). These systems also improve the traceability up to the patient level, which is requested more and more by national regulations.

 

Several barriers exist to the deployment of bedside scanning, including the need for barcodes applied to an international standard (i.e. GS1 Level) to be available on each single dose. The EAHP published a request for the production of single dose-packed drugs (/practice-and-policy/bar-coding-medicines-to-the-singl…) and is collaborating with the pharmaceutical industry to progressively improve the identification of drugs in Europe.

 

 

• To present an example of a successful implementation of bedside scanning in a European hospital;

• To present the industrial challenges to the production of single doses answering to the hospital needs;

• To discuss the next steps of collaboration between hospital pharmacists and the pharmaceutical industry to improve the safety of drug administration.

 

 

At the end of the satellite the participants should be able:

 

• to appraise the risk of errors during the administration of drugs to patients and the strategies to improve the safety of this step of the process;

• to analyse the prerequisites for the implementation of bedside scanning in their institution;

• to explain the barriers to the production of single doses by the pharmaceutical industry.