There are many tools available in community pharmacy that support those in governance, registered pharmacists and the pharmacy team to promote a culture of medication safety within the pharmacy. Some of these tools are:

Customer feedback: Engaging with customers and patients, listening to their needs and the barriers they encounter when taking their medication, will enable pharmacists to identify non-compliance in their treatments and support them to achieve better health outcomes. For example, if a patient has a visual impairment and two of their prescribed medications look quite similar, there is a high risk for the patient to mix them up and take twice the same medicinal product. Therefore, supporting the patient in the identification of the product may help the patient to differentiate the medicinal product and increase medication safety.

Risk assessment: By assessing the processes in place at the pharmacy, you will be able to identify areas that may pose a risk to patients or your team. For example, by assessing the pharmacy dispensing process you may identify that there is a very limited bench work area assigned for checking prescriptions and that prescriptions awaiting to be checked are piled up. This may pose a risk in that inadvertently patient’s medications may get mixed. Therefore, the workflow may need to be modified to reduce this potential risk and therefore increase medication safety. 

Standard operating procedures (SOPs) and protocols: These features ensure consistency on a service provided across the pharmacy team. One of the purposes of the SOP is to map out step-by-step the process carried out to ensure and promote safety, and good practice. For example, the SOP on the generation of pharmacy labels may outline that warning information printed on pharmacy labels is formatted in a different font size to alert the patient.

Dispensing error reporting: Learning from errors and sharing those learnings will promote and increase the safety of the pharmacy practice. Documenting errors, investigating the cause that led to the error, and putting preventative and remedial measures in place will identify gaps in the pharmacy practice. Adopting a no-blame culture within the pharmacy team will support the reporting of errors and near misses and promote medication safety.

For further information please visit the Professional and Smart Pharmacy sections available on the IPU website.