Medication errors happen in all phases of perioperative care, often due to the complexity and fast-paced nature of the setting, as well as the multiple handoffs of care. The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) has released a new assessment to help hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers, and other surgery settings evaluate their medication safety practices and identify specific challenges and opportunities for improvement.
The ISMP Medication Safety Self Assessment® for Perioperative Settings also offers providers a way to document compliance with risk assessment and performance improvement requirements from various state and federal regulatory and accrediting agencies. Participating organizations that submit their assessment findings to ISMP anonymously will be able to compare their individual experiences with the aggregate experiences of demographically similar facilities nationwide—the data submission deadline is August 31, 2021.
“We urge perioperative service providers to get involved in this unique effort to not only advance their own safety initiatives, but also to benefit the entire healthcare community,” says ISMP President Michael Cohen, RPh, MS, ScD (hon), DPS (hon), FASHP. “The assessment will allow ISMP to detail our nation’s baseline efforts to prevent patient harm in this setting and develop and share effective prevention strategies.”
The self assessment is being conducted under a contract from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). ISMP has conducted multiple other medication safety self assessments for specific care settings and focus areas, including for hospitals, community/ambulatory pharmacies, high-alert medications, oncology, and antithrombotic therapy. Several national medication safety initiatives have been created based on data from ISMP’s previous self assessments, and other countries have adopted some of the assessment tools to gather information and goals for their own safety efforts.
Facilities can participate anonymously via a secure, password protected website, and will have unlimited opportunity to view and download their own weighted scores during the data collection period. Participants are encouraged to attend a free ISMP webinar on May 25, 2021, to learn more about the self assessment and how to obtain the most valuable, accurate, and useful results.
For more information and to register for the free webinar, visit: www.ismp.org/node/18027.