The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) has issued its first set of best practices for community and ambulatory pharmacy settings.
The ISMP Targeted Medication Safety Best Practices for Community Pharmacy are intended to help identify, inspire, and encourage adoption of consensus-based best practices for specific medication-safety issues that can result in patient harm, even with several warnings. The best practices are geared for community pharmacies but some may be applicable in other settings as well.
The new guidance addresses issues such as:
- preventing wrong patient errors when filling prescriptions, responding to questions, and administering vaccines
- expanding and maximizing the use of barcode scanning during medication and vaccine dispensing and administration
- avoiding errors involving accidental daily dosing of methotrexate for non-cancer indications
- standardizing the use of metric units of measure when prescribing, dispensing, and measuring liquid oral medications
- using information about medication safety risks and errors that have occurred in other organizations to take preventative action;
- obtaining and using a patient's weight to verify dosing of weight-based medications
- maximizing the use of technology to prevent errors during the return-to-stock process
- establishing standard processes to prevent errors during vaccine preparation and administration
Follow this link to learn more and see the recommendations and to download the guidelines! A worksheet designed to assist pharmacies in analyzing their current status with implementing the ISMP Targeted Medication Safety Best Practices for Community Pharmacy is available here.
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Sarah Pagenkopf, PharmD, BCPS
PSW Director of Professional & Educational Services
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