Perspectives

This piece discusses the critical role community pharmacists play in ensuring medication safety.

This piece discusses the impact that COVID-19 has had on the services provided by pharmacists and highlights available resources to support them in ensuring medication safety.

This perspective describes key themes reflected in AHRQ PSNet resources released in 2019 related to the role of the pharmacist in enhancing patient safety.

This piece reviews unique characteristics of community pharmacies that can affect medication safety and spotlights the need for further research examining medication errors in community settings.

excerpt

In this piece, a pharmacist highlights the importance of earning patient safety certification.

Opioids are known to be high risk medications, and concerns about patient harm from prescription opioid misuse have been increasing in the United States. This Annual Perspective summarizes research published in 2016 that explored the extent of harm from their use, described problematic prescribing practices that likely contribute to adverse events, and demonstrated some promising practices to foster safer opioid use.

Medication safety in hospitals depends on the successful execution of a complex system of scores of individual tasks that can be categorized into five stages: ordering or prescribing, preparing, dispensing, transcribing, and monitoring the patient's response. Many of these tasks lend themselves to technologic tools. Over the past 20 years, technology has played an increasingly larger role toward achieving the five rights of medication safety: getting the right dose of the right drug to the right patient using the right route and at the right time. While several of these technologies may incur significant upfront and maintenance costs, the net impact over time may be reduced overall institutional costs and improvements in work efficiency. Examples of technologic tools commonly seen in many hospitals today include computerized provider order entry (CPOE) with decision support and automatic dispensing carts, also known as medication dispensing robots. While outside the scope of this Perspective, it is important to emphasize that many nontechnologic interventions, such as clinical pharmacists on physician rounds, can be equally effective in improving medication safety.

Patients have three roles in improving patient safety: helping to ensure their own safety, working with health care organizations to improve safety at the organization and unit level, and advocating as citizens for public reporting and accountability of hospital and health system performance. The following case illustrates how patients can help ensure their own safety.

Pharmacists are comfortable participants in the patient safety movement in matters pertaining to prescriptions, medication systems, institutions, and national policy development. The very existence of the profession of pharmacy is rooted in the fundamental...