Understanding and Preventing Medication Errors
Overview
Understanding and Preventing Medication Errors: A Toolkit for Practitioners is a comprehensive, user-friendly medication safety toolkit on CD-ROM. It provides teaching and training tools to effectively report, analyze, and prevent medication errors. It includes ready-to-use templates, forms, reports, presentations, and a medication safety model—all of which an organization can adapt for its own use.
Contents
- Customizable slide presentations with scripted talking points on medication error data collection, categorization, and analysis
- Time-tested methods for reporting, categorizing, and analyzing error data
- Dangerous abbreviations; similar drug names; look-alike labeling and packaging; errors in orders, calculations, and technology; and other common problem-prone areas
- Recommendations and tips from USP's experts on medication safety issues for specific patient populations, hospital locations, and drug product types
- A USP medication safety initiative model, customizable error data forms and reports, and an error prevention action-impact scoring grid
- The National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting Programs national medication error category index and case examples to practice proper categorization of errors
- MEDMARX® annual data summary reports for 2001 and 2002, indicating national error trends and causes
- Selected issues of USP's CAPSLink™ and Quality Review newsletters, containing topical medication safety issues and proposed solutions
Who Needs Understanding and Preventing Medication Errors
- Pharmacists
- Nurses
- Risk managers
- Physicians
- Quality improvement specialists
- Patient safety officers
- Medication safety officers
- Other healthcare practitioners committed to improving patient safety
How Understanding and Preventing Medication Errors Helps
- Teaching tool for medication error reporting and prevention in academic and hospital/healthcare system environments
- Helps to establish a robust medication error reporting program with tips on creating an organizational culture of safety
- Helps to improve return on investment in medication error reporting programs with a method to assess the impact of potential corrective actions
- Facilitates effective reporting to management, pharmacy and therapeutics, and patient safety committees
- Provides impactful, proactive steps to attack and prevent medication errors
- Highlights common problem-prone areas
