Be bold about showcasing your medication safety improvements. Share them with the front-line staff, administration and medical Staff. Don’t minimize what your department or Medication Safety Committee is doing in order to improve patient safety. Pharmacists have an obligation to monitor for potentially unsafe processes and conditions. We can do this through evaluation of reported medication errors, including near misses (errors that did not reach the patient), findings while performing various audits or unit inspections, medication use evaluations, and chart reviews to name a few. However, when discovering safety issues, be sure to document the discovery and plan for correction and improvement. This is key: don’t forget to circle back to confirm the changes implemented had a positive impact on decreasing error potential. If the changes you made didn’t have a positive impact on patient safety, that is okay, but go back to the safety issue at hand and come up with another idea for change implementation and try it again. Keep doing this process until positive progress is seen. Through it all, keep a record and share those discoveries and improvements with anyone who will listen!
