Community pharmacies are common providers of medication delivery that harbor process weaknesses affecting safety. This guidance shares evidence-based steps to address problems such as wrong patient errors and lack of consistent barcode system use in the community setting.

The AHRQ Surveys on Patient Safety Culture™ (SOPS®) Community Pharmacy Survey and accompanying toolkit were developed to collect opinions of community pharmacy staff on the safety culture at their pharmacies.

This fact sheet provides a list of high-alert medications commonly used in ambulatory care and recommends strategies to reduce risk of errors.

To protect children and pets from accidental exposure to prescription medications, this consumer alert outlines the dangers of inappropriate storage and disposal of medication skin patches.

Data surveillance and transparency are core to measuring and informing improvement efforts. This website provides detailed data that links ambulatory care prescribing activity to National Health Service hospitalizations in an effort to clarify potential adverse medication events. The dashboard launched tracking gastrointestinal bleeding as an indicator of a medication-related adverse result and will expand to other indicators and conditions over time.

Transitions are known to be vulnerable to communication errors. This toolkit focuses on patient transitions between ambulatory care environments and encourages staff to engage patients and families in their care to prevent errors during care transitions.

The opioid crisis is a persisting patient safety problem. One approach to prevent misuse of opioids is to raise awareness of the addictive nature of the medication. This national campaign enlists communities and individual clinicians to provide patient education to address the opioid epidemic. The website offers videos and other resources to assist community-level efforts to reduce risk for opioid addiction.

Standardization has been embraced as a strategy to improve health literacy and to reduce patient misunderstanding of medication instructions. This tool provides standard language that clarifies directions for patients regarding when they should take their medications.

Studies have shown that pharmacist involvement can prevent medication errors. To help patients take their medications safely, this consumer update discusses pharmacists as participants in a government drug information center and reveals the top five questions submitted along with their corresponding answers.

This toolkit provides resources to help augment testing processes in ambulatory care settings, including tools for identifying areas of concern and measuring improvements.

This set of leaflets provides patients with information about taking high-alert medications safely.

This tool evaluates the safety of cancer treatment delivery in hospitals and ambulatory care settings.

This toolkit includes comprehensive information for patients and families to facilitate safe transitions from hospital to follow-up care.

This trio of modules provides ambulatory medical practices with tools to develop teamwork, assess culture and processes, and improve medication safety.

This form can help patients document their prescriptions and other health information prior to visits with health care providers.

This community pharmacy measurement tool can be used to review processes for 10 elements that affect the safety of medication delivery and administration.