Don’t Drop the Ball: Safer Handoffs in Community Pharmacy
Comprehensive, accessible, timely, and correct communication is key to providing safe and effective healthcare. Many studies have identified poor communication as a primary contributing factor to patient harm especially during the transfer of care between providers. Studies of these transfers or ‘handoffs’ in healthcare have shown that there is an increased risk of patient harm […]
Full Disclosure: What Makes a Good Apology
While medication incidents that reach a patient tend to be rare in community pharmacies, they do occasionally happen. For most pharmacy professionals, patient harm is one of their greatest fears. Disclosing a medication incident to a patient or their loved one or agent is a difficult but necessary step to patient care that requires compassion […]
4 Safety Culture Resources for Community Pharmacy
According to the US Institute of Medicine, “the biggest challenge to moving toward a safer health system is changing the culture from one of blaming individuals for errors to one in which errors are treated not as personal failures, but as opportunities to improve the system and prevent harm.” Unfortunately, a ‘blame and shame’ approach […]
Reducing Distractions and Interruptions to Improve … Wait, What Was I Doing!?
Community pharmacies are busy environments that are prone to distractions and interruptions. Patients can walk in at any time, telephones and fax machines go off, alarms ping from computers, and staff interrupt themselves and others for a broad range of reasons. While the rate of interruptions and distractions in community pharmacies varies, one study found […]
4 CQI Resources for Community Pharmacies
Continuous quality improvement (CQI) is an ongoing approach to problem-solving and harm prevention. CQI focuses on identifying the root causes of a problem and introducing ways to eliminate or reduce the problem through open-ended analysis and assessment of process change. In the pharmacy field, CQI focuses on preventing medication incidents and continually looking for ways […]