Helping healthcare organizations analyse medication incidents
ISMP Canada and USP partner to deliver one-day workshop
Tuesday June 30, 2009 -- Jason Thompson
In an effort to help healthcare organizations analyse and learn from their medication incidents, the Institute of Safe Medication Practices Canada (ISMP Canada) has partnered with the United States Pharmacopeial (USP) Convention to deliver a one-day interactive workshop entitled, Analyzing Medication Incidents Effectively to Enhance Medication Safety.

“It is crucial to analyse these incidents so that we can develop solutions to prevent them from recurring,” says Roger Cheng, a research analyst with ISMP Canada.

“The attendees of the workshop will be provided with a set of tools to look at their own medication incidents. It is one thing to collect medication incident data but it doesn’t automatically lead to useful information if it just sits in a filing cabinet or a database.”

Scheduled for Sept. 21 at the Sheraton Centre Hotel in Toronto, the workshop will be led by ISMP Canada and USP experts and is geared towards pharmacy directors, risk managers, patient safety officers, medication safety officers and other healthcare professionals who want to learn from their medication incidents.

According to ISMP Canada and USP, human vigilance alone is not enough to prevent medication error and participants will learn effective risk reduction strategies based on proven medication safety principles as well as structured and logical approaches to derive meaningful data interpretation and prioritize medication safety efforts.

Participants will also return from the workshop with take-home materials and tools to help analyse and prioritize medication incident information.

Cheng said the most desirable outcome is to learn from past medication mistakes and make the changes necessary to prevent future incidents, adding that a common refrain among healthcare professionals is, ‘now that I’ve got all this data, how do I learn from it?’

“We hope this workshop fills that gap,” Cheng says.

This workshop is a first-time venture between ISMP Canada and USP, an American scientific non-profit organization that sets standards for the quality, purity, strength, and identity of prescription and over-the-counter medicines sold in the United States.

The main difference between the two organizations is that while ISMP Canada provides qualitative analysis of medication incidents by looking at what is behind an incident, USP has experience at conducting quantitative analysis through trend identification.

Cheng says these two distinct approaches to data analysis are complementary and are a major reason why ISMP Canada has partnered with USP to host this workshop.

Click here for more information, or to register for the workshop, which has been assigned seven CEUs by the Ontario College of Pharmacists.

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