Targeted Medication Safety Best Practices for Community Pharmacy

The ISMP Targeted Medication Safety Best Practices for Community Pharmacy were developed to identify, inspire, and mobilize adoption of consensus-based Best Practices for specific medication safety issues that can cause patient harm, despite repeated warnings. 

This is ISMP's first set of Best Practices for community and ambulatory pharmacy settings. ISMP launched its Targeted Medication Safety Best Practices for Hospitals in 2014. The Best Practices presented in this guidance document have been reviewed by an external expert advisory panel. As with the acute care-focused Best Practices, the document will be updated as needed every two years. 

ISMP encourages community pharmacies to focus their medication safety efforts on these Best Practices, which are realistic and have been successfully adopted by numerous organizations. While targeted for the community pharmacy setting, some Best Practices are applicable to other healthcare settings. 

The Best Practices contained within this document address the following issues:

• 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 inadvertent daily dosing of methotrexate for non-cancer indications 
• Standardizing the use of metric (milliliter--mL) units of measure when prescribing, dispensing, and measuring oral liquid medications 
• Using information about medication safety risks and errors that have occurred in other organizations to take preventative action 

The development of the 2023-2024 ISMP Targeted Medication Safety Best Practices for Community Pharmacy was supported by Novartis, Name Creation & Regulatory Strategy. 

^{How to cite: Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP). ISMP Targeted Medication Safety Best Practices for Community Pharmacy. ISMP; 2023: https://www.ismp.org/guidelines/best-practices-community-pharmacy}