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.

Organizations worldwide are focusing efforts on reducing the conditions that contribute to medical error. This website provides a collection of reports and other resources that cover activities and concerns of the 37 member countries active in the organization to address universal challenges to patient safety.

This website for independent community pharmacy owners across the United Kingdom features both free and members-only guidance, reporting platforms, and document templates to support patient safety. It includes reporting tools and incident analysis reports for providers in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Topics covered in the communications include look-alike and sound-alike drugs, patient safety audits, and safe dispensing of liquid medications.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality conducts safety culture surveys in a wide variety of clinical settings and makes the results publicly available on a regular basis. This report contains responses to the Community Pharmacy Survey on Patient Safety Culture from 331 participating pharmacies, most of which were chain drugstores or pharmacies within integrated health systems. The areas of strength were similar to the 2015 report, with most community pharmacies scoring well for patient counseling and openness of communication regarding unsafe situations. Inadequate staffing and production pressures were the commonly identified barriers to safety. A PSNet perspective explored safety issues in the community pharmacy setting in detail.

Wrong route medication administration is a never event. This report examined the context, organizational and human factors that contributed to the accidental intravenous administration of an oral solution into a pediatric patient. Safety recommendations include medication safety training, standardized administration processes, and elevation of the medication safety officer role. 

In light of the current opioid crisis, the use of opioids to manage noncancer-related chronic pain in the ambulatory environment has been targeted for improvement. This AHRQ-funded initiative offers a six-element multidisciplinary redesign approach that highlights areas such as leadership development, prescription monitoring, and care planning.

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.

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.

The practice of using multi-dose insulin pens, meant for single patient use only, among multiple patients has been linked to health care–associated infections. This announcement outlines federal labeling requirements to raise awareness of the risks associated with this practice to prevent misuse of the devices.

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 announcement raises awareness of risks associated with children accidentally ingesting over-the-counter eye drops and nasal sprays.

This Web site raises awareness of risks associated with buying medications from online pharmacies and offers resources to help identify whether an online pharmacy is safe or fake.

In this video, a pediatrician describes tips for teaching older children how to take medicine safely.

This announcement reports on numerous errors in which an oral medication, nimodipine, was administered intravenously and describes how such errors occur.