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MedicAtion Safety TOOLS AND RESOURCES

The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) offers a wide range of resources and information to help healthcare practitioners in a variety of healthcare settings prevent errors and ensure that medications are used safely. All of the ISMP tools listed below are free, downloadable, and easy to use.

In addition, ISMP offers teleconferences on timely topics in medication safety, educational symposia at leading healthcare meetings, and knowledgeable and articulate speakers from varied health disciplines who can provide expert advice and education on patient safety issues.

Healthcare practitioners can also browse ISMP’s online product catalog for videos, books, and other resources.


"DO NOT CRUSH" LIST
Oral Dosage Forms That Should Not Be Crushed, sometimes known as the "Do Not Crush" list. From John F. Mitchell, Medication Safety Coordinator, University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers and ISMP. An updated list in PDF form.

BlackBox Warnings
Black Box Warnings emphasize significant and serious safety data for prescription drugs. This website provides listings of products with Black Box Warnings along with summaries of the warnings. From Joyce Generali, MS, RPh, FASHP, Director of Drug Information, Kansas University Medical Center.

Brochure for Consumers on Medication Misuse
This ISMP brochure helps educate consumers about the problem of inappropriate medication use and how their pharmacist can help them take medications correctly. It is part of a broader education campaign by ISMP and APhA; click here for more on the campaign and available tools.

Community Pharmacy Safety Program
ISMP tools that help community pharmacies and other ambulatory practice settings assess their medication safety practices and develop a medication safety program.

Error-Prone Abbreviations List
Abbreviations, symbols, and dose designations that are frequently misinterpreted and involved in harmful medication errors. These items should NEVER be used when communicating medical information.

FDA Patient Safety News Videos
Downloadable and printable FDA broadcasts on patient safety issues, many of which feature information from ISMP.

FDA Safety Alerts
FDA safety alerts for drugs and medication-related medical devices

FMEA Process (with Sample FMEA)
Overview and additional resources for failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), an ongoing quality improvement process employed to examine the use of new products processes to determine points of potential failure and what their effect would.

Free CE on Smart Pumps and PCA
Pharmacists and nurses can earn free CE credits by reading ISMP’s educational monographs on smart pump technology and patient controlled-analgesia (PCA) and completing online tests.

Guidelines
Documents with suggestions from ISMP on improving medication safety practices.

Guidelines for Preventing Medication Errors in Pediatrics
Article that appeared in the Journal of Pediatric Pharmacology and Therapeutics that concentrates on medication errors that are common in pediatrics facilities, with recommendations and strategies to reduce the potential for medication errors in those settings.

Improving Medication Safety with Anticoagulant Therapy
ISMP has compiled a variety of proactive tools, strategies, and resources to assist healthcare organizations identify and remediate error-prone practices that may exist when antithrombotic agents are prescribed, dispensed, and administered

IOM Report on Medication Errors
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) has conducted a Congressionally-mandated study of drug safety and quality, and the resulting report provides recommendations on identifying and preventing medication errors for consumers, healthcare providers, healthcare organizations, industry, and government agencies.

ISMP Assess-ERRTM
A medication system worksheet to assist with error report investigation.

ISMP Canada Chemotherapy Error Root Cause Analysis
ISMP Canada’s root cause analysis (RCA) report on a fatal fluorouracil overdose that occurred at an Edmonton, Alberta hospital. This full report, submitted to the Alberta Cancer Board, was publicly released in May 2007.

ISMP Confused Drug name List
Drug names that have been mistaken for one another, including look-alike and sound-alike name pairs.

ISMP High-Alert Medications
Drugs that bear a heightened risk of causing significant patient harm when used in error. Use this list to determine which medications require special safeguards to reduce the risk of errors.

ISMP Positions and Viewpoints
ISMP positions on key issues in medication safety and error prevention.

ISMP Rural Hospital Medication Safety Connection™ Resource Kit
This unique resource offers a comprehensive information binder designed to help small and rural hospitals jump-start their medication safety programs. It also includes CDs with three 90-minute teleconference presentations on key medication safety topics by ISMP experts.

ISMP-FDA Abbreviations Toolkit
ISMP and FDA are conducting a national campaign to eliminate the use of error-prone abbreviations in all forms of medical communications. This toolkit contains useful resources, including a brochure, print public service ad, and slide set.

Links
Links to other websites that contain helpful information and resources on patient safety.

Pathways for Medication Safety
Manuals on strategic planning, risk management, and assessing bedside bar coding readiness that help create a system-based approach to error prevention.

Quarterly Action Agenda (Free CE)
These agenda topics, which originally appeared in the ISMP Medication Safety Alert! Acute Care Edition, have been prepared for your organization and interdisciplinary committee to stimulate discussion and action to reduce the risk of medication errors.

Sample FMEA
Example of a health care Failure Mode and Effects Analysis for anticoagulants. The severity of each failure mode has been scored. However, since the probability of each failure and its ability to be detected before causing patient harm will vary from organization to organization, these scores have been omitted so that each organization can make its own assessment of these vulnerabilities.

Self Assessments
ISMP tools that help healthcare organizations assess their medication safety practices and compare aggregate data with other similar organizations.

Tall Man Letters
The sets of look-alike drug names in this tool have been modified using “tall man” letters to help draw attention to the dissimilarities in their names. Several studies have shown that highlighting sections of drug names using tall man (mixed case) letters can help distinguish similar drug names, making them less prone to mix-ups.

Textbook Errata
Corrections for errors in published medical literature.

Throw Away Your Old Medicines Safely
Information for safely throwing away old medicines

Click here if you have any questions about these tools or if you have any suggestions.

 

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