Improving Medication Safety in Community Pharmacy: Assessing Risk and Opportunities for Change

The Improving Medication Safety in Community Pharmacy: Assessing Risk and Opportunities for Change is designed to help community pharmacies personnel identify potential medication safety risks and prevent errors.

Pharmacists and other pharmacy personnel should use the materials and tools in this workbook to pinpoint specific system weakness in the medication-use processes and to provide a starting point for successful organizational improvements.

After utilizing this workbook, community pharmacy personnel will be able to:

1. Initiate a risk assessment process to identify system-based medication safety improvements in the community pharmacy setting
2. Use ISMP’s Key Elements of the Medication Use System™ to help identify and prevent risk in daily practice
3. Apply knowledge of ISMP’s Key Elements of the Medication Use System™ to identify breakdowns in the system that have contributed to the error
4. Examine flow diagrams or flow charts of the medication process to identify variability in current medication-use processes
5. Select effective error reduction strategies that can prevent patient harm
6. Utilize the Assess-ERR™ for a medication error or near miss that has occurred in your practice.

_{The Improving Medication Safety in Community Pharmacy: Assessing Risk and Opportunities for Change and its components are copyrighted by ISMP. This workbook or parts of it may be printed for individual use or distributed for training purposes within your organization as part of their ongoing quality improvement activities.  The content of this workbook may not be altered in any way or used in any commercial context, without written permission from the ISMP.}

_{How to cite: Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP). Improving medication safety in community pharmacy: assessing risk and opportunities for change [Workbook]. Horsham, PA: ISMP. 2009.}