Miscommunication between hospitals and community pharmacists at patient discharge can result in incorrect or incomplete medication distribution to patients. This study describes utilization and impact of the Transfers of Care Around Medicines (TCAM) service post-hospital discharge at community pharmacies. An increasing percentage of TCAM referrals were completed post-intervention, but 45% were not completed at all or took longer than one month. The impact of the TCAM service on adverse drug events (ADE) and unintentional medication discrepancies (UMD) was uncertain. Future research may explore reasons for low/late completions or focus on high-risk medications, as those were associated with the most ADE and UMD.

Increases in clinician workload can increase the risk of medical errors. This survey of Swedish community pharmacists found that while perceived workload increased and work environment decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was no perceived impact on patient safety. Findings underscore the importance of effective communication between management and frontline healthcare workers during crises.

Misleading or unclear abbreviations can cause communication errors and threaten patient safety. This article highlights how lessons learned regarding abbreviations in aviation can apply to healthcare to avoid abbreviation-related medical errors, such as prescribing errors.

STOPP (Screening Tool of Older Persons’ Prescriptions) and START (Screening Tool to Alert to Right Treatment) criteria are used to identify potentially inappropriate prescribing in older adults. This article describes the consensus process to update and validate the third version of the STOPP/START criteria using evidence from a systematic review and input from a panel with expertise in geriatric pharmacology. The consensus process resulted in additional STOPP criteria (133 versus 80 in version 2) and START criteria (57 versus 34 in version 2). The additional criteria in version 3 can help clinicians detect and prevent adverse drug-drug and drug-disease interactions.

Previous research has found that CancelRx can improve communication between electronic health record (EHR) systems and pharmacy dispensing systems and increase successful medication discontinuation. This interrupted time series analysis assessed the impact of CancelRx implementation on successful discontinuation of medications e-prescribed in ambulatory healthcare settings. After CancelRx implementation, the proportion of e-prescriptions sold after discontinuation in the EHR decreased from 8.0% to 1.4%.

Many healthcare professionals experienced adverse emotional and psychological outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. This survey of 665 health system pharmacists found that pharmacists working in settings with higher levels of workplace wellness support were less likely to experience depression, anxiety, or burnout, and report higher levels of professional quality of life during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Community pharmacists are perhaps the last line of defense in preventing medication errors in the outpatient setting; therefore, ensuring a strong safety culture is critical. This review identified 11 studies reporting on safety culture using the AHRQ Community Pharmacy Survey on Patient Safety Culture. Pharmacists and pharmacy staff rated overall patient safety highly, but more than half identified workload as a concern.

Children are particularly vulnerable to medication errors. Weight- and age-based dosing, different medication formulations, and miscommunication with parents and caregivers contribute to errors. Data-driven education and peer feedback have been noted as effective strategies to reduce prescribing errors.

Vaccine errors can limit the effectiveness of immunization efforts. Based on survey data from 227 health professionals in France, this study identified several areas for improvement related to knowledge of vaccine-related errors, such as contraindications during pregnancy, vaccine storage, age-related vaccine schedules, and vaccine administration.

Clinical decision support (CDS) systems were developed to support safe medication ordering, alerting prescribers to potential unsafe interactions such as drug-drug, drug-allergy, and dosing errors. This study uses a sociotechnical framework to understand the relationship between primary care prescribers’ safety work and CDS. Prescribers described the usefulness of CDS but also noted alert fatigue.

The patient safety movement recognizes that most errors occur at the system level, not the individual level, and therefore uses a systems approach toward improving patient safety. A similar systems approach can be used by pharmacy programs to enhance the education of pharmacy students. This article describes the sociotechnical framework of healthcare (structures, processes, outcomes) and parallels with pharmacy programs.

Minoritized and vulnerable people often experience delays in care due to systemic biases. This survey study examined the association between perceived discrimination at community pharmacies and foregoing or delaying picking up medications. Participants reported discrimination based on race, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, income, and prescription insurance; those participants were more likely to delay picking up their medications. There was no association with discrimination and foregoing medications.