Pharmaceutical medication safety, medication error, adverse drug reaction, patient safety

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Original Research Article

Effect of the pharmacy staff shortage on the medication safety

Aymen Khalid Al-Suwailem1


1Prince Sultan Cardiac Center

Author’s Email: aymen_4120(at)hotmail.com

Tel.:+966505209837

Aymen Khalid Al-Suwailem


Article Number: ibspr.21.007  |   Pages: 54-77  |   Vol. 9 (2), March 2021   |   DOI: https://doi.org/10.15739/ibspr.21.007

 Received: May 19, 2019  Accepted: October 23, 2019  Published: March 14, 2021

Abstract

This study intend to evaluate the relationship between sufficient well trained healthcare staff and the medication safety. Medication mishaps are the most common errors in healthcare, and as a result medication safety has become a top priority for healthcare organizations. The focus on medication safety underscores ongoing goals for risk managers; to reduce the frequency and severity of errors related to medication use and to help facilities medication error prevention strategies. Medication errors can involve many individuals, processes, and systems, risk managers need to help their facilities adopt a multidisciplinary and systems approach to medication safety. Common causes of medication errors include noncompliance with policies and procedures, competency and credentialing issues, and inadequate staff and/or inadequate orientation and training, education programs should be provided to heighten practitioner’s awareness of medication policies and procedures and to educate them about medication safety procedures. These educational and training programs should be able to provide knowledge to pharmacy staff: Guidance on preparing medication safety, education programs to the heads of units and hence they could distribute the information to the remaining employees, a medication safety teaching plan, reproducible visuals to customize for use during training and as handouts, pre-training and post-training quizzes to identify areas in need of review or additional emphasis. Therefore we should have adequate staff initially then those staff should keep ongoing training and they should get several tips such as building a strong trusting relationships as these are fundamental to how well care is delivered, take time to communicate, update records, and share information, ensure regular and formal reviews of care plans and medication, prioritize safety by protecting the drugs round, improving systems and attention to detail, identify, capture and develop good practice and help disseminate this to all staff. Finally, from the analysis of the given data in this study medication errors increased significantly in the year 2017 where there is a shortage of pharmacists (16 to 20) with 21 and more medication errors, while few medication errors recorded in the year 2018 where there is no shortage of pharmacists (0 to 5) with (6 to 10) medication errors (p < 0.01).

Keywords:

Pharmaceutical medication safety, medication error, adverse drug reaction, patient safety

How to Cite this Article

Al-Suwailem AK(2021). Effect of the pharmacy staff shortage on the medication safety.Issues Biol. Sci Pharma Res. 9(2):54-77.

Author(s) retain the copyright of this article. Author(s) agree that this article remain permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License.


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