PHARMACISTS are being urged not to wait for regulation demanding mandatory incident reporting, but implement systems to learn from errors and boost medication safety.
Speaking during an International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP) webinar on Fri night, pharmacist and Pharmapod CEO, Leonora O'Brien, stressed the need for the profession to capture and share information about medication errors and near-miss situations to improve quality use of medicines.
"It's incumbent upon us as professionals to take a leading role in the reduction of patient harm relating to medicine in line with the World Health Organization (WHO) Patient Safety Challenge," she said.
While noting the WHO's goal of reducing medication errors globally by 50% over the next five years was "lofty", she said pharmacists had the skills to help achieve it, if infrastructure to capture and share learnings is implemented.
O'Brien told delegates that in the absence of regulations requiring pharmacists to record incidents, pharmacy owners and managers need to lead the way and create a culture of reporting.
"To have the right culture in place where it's not a punitive culture is critical," she said.
"People need to have a psychologically safe environment before they are open to sharing the mistakes and errors that they have been involved in.
"In the absence of effective leadership [from regulators], then each pharmacist managing their particular practice can take it upon themselves to be that leader and to help train their teams... put in systems to record, review and analyse incidents, then their teams will start to learn from those incidents and they will see the value."
O'Brien said it was important to highlight the good work being done to improve medicines safety in pharmacies.
"There is that adage that if you can't see it you can't be it," she said.
"Highlighting the good work that people are doing - and there is brilliant work being done in every single country and sometimes it's in a silo, [is important].
"If the regulators aren't underpinning it at a national level, if we keep highlighting the good work that's been done locally then the snowball effect will happen and then it can be rolled out.
"But leadership, as we've seen through COVID-19 is critical to underpinning these behaviours across particular countries."
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