Online communities of practice promote pan-Canadian collaboration
Friday October 12, 2007 -- Jason Thompson
Because there are so many teams working on the Safer Healthcare Now (SHN) campaign to varying degrees of implementation, Mary Lou Lester, a medication reconciliation pharmacist with the Brandon Regional Health Authority (BRHA), says virtual communities of practice supported by the SHN campaign are a great resource.

Lester, who leads teams working on medication reconciliation in acute, home and long-term care settings, says she visits the virtual community of practice about three or four times a week.

“When we have a team meeting and we might have an issue that we’re dealing with, one of the first things I will do is go to the website and see if anybody else has posted that issue,” Lester says.

“Often I can just get tips from that because somebody else has already dealt with it.”

Lester says if the specific issue hasn’t been discussed online, she’ll post the query herself and wait to see what responses come back. Because there are hundreds of teams working on medication reconciliation across Canada, Lester says she is usually able to find the information she is looking for.

When BRHA started with medication reconciliation in April, Lester says there was already about one year's worth of data online.

“It saves you a lot of research time,” she says. “I think it speeds up our success and our movement throughout the project.”

Lester says there have been cases where process improvement suggestions posted by other organizations on the virtual community of practice have made a lasting impact at BRHA.

For example, surgeons have medication reconciliation forms available to them to write post-operative orders for patients who are new admissions. However, if the patient in question has already been admitted and has been in a hospital ward for a period of time prior to surgery, their admission medication orders would have already been written and the form wouldn’t be available to the surgeon to write post-operative orders.

“We wanted to let (surgeons) know that this is a new admission and here is a form containing your patient’s current home medications that you can use for admission orders,” says Lester. “The use of this form will save the surgeon time as well as increase the accuracy of the home medications ordered while in hospital.”

Virtual communities of practice have been established with respect to each SHN intervention. For more information or to sign up for the online portal, visit www.saferhealthcarenow.ca.