Pharmacists EQUIP doctors with safety net when it comes to prescribing in hospital
A major research study commissioned by the General Medical Council (GMC) published on 3/12/09 has highlighted that almost 1 in 10 prescribed items in hospital have errors associated with them.
The prevalence arm of the EQUIP study was carried out by hospital pharmacists in 19 hospitals in North-west England. 124,260 medication orders were checked on seven ‘census’ days by pharmacists within the study hospitals. 11,077 errors were detected with a mean error rate of 8.9%. Two per cent of the errors were classified as potentially lethal. Errors were made by all grades of doctor (including consultants) and the highest error rate (10.3%) was with foundation year 2 doctors. Errors were most often made at the time of the patient’s admission to hospital. It is reported in the study that nearly all the errors were intercepted by PHARMACISTS before they could affect patients.
In the qualitative arm of the study, a number of respondents (doctors) said they relied heavily on pharmacists and nurses to identify and correct prescribing errors. They viewed the role of the pharmacist as a safety net to prevent potential errors resulting in patients receiving the wrong medication.
“This study confirms what most NHS doctors, nurses and pharmacists already know. That is, there are a large number of prescribing errors made by doctors, and pharmacists, on the whole, pick these up and prevent patient harm,” said Dave Thornton, Chair of the Terms and Conditions Committee for the Guild of Healthcare Pharmacists and one of the participants in the study. “The study underlines the key role that pharmacists have within the healthcare team in delivering the patient safety agenda. Of significant interest is the number of potentially lethal errors that were prevented by pharmacists in the study. The frequency of the most severe errors was quoted to be 2% of all the errors detected. This equates to approximately 8000 potentially lethal errors prevented in the 19 study hospitals over a 1 year period. The recently published Care Quality Commission National study looking at managing patients’ medicines after discharge from hospital, makes a number of recommendations that Primary Care Trusts should put in place to ensure the right information is provided to hospitals when patients are admitted to hospital. This may help to overcome a large proportion of the errors that were found to arise during the admission process,” he added. “My only concern in the current staffing environment, where 1 in 4 band 6 and 1 in 5 band 7 posts are vacant, is whether this level of input can be sustained. Our members are reporting increasing workloads and increasing levels of stress and I am worried that services may struggle to deliver this vital safety net in the future.”
The full study report can be found at:
http://www.gmc-uk.org/about/research/5155.asp