RPS Conference 2010, Abstracts 2010 - Royal Pharmaceutical Society

CONCLUSIONS
The White Paper on Pharmacy and The Care Homes’ Use of Medicines Study 1 recommends a
pharmacist be given over arching responsibility for the safe running of the whole system. This
audit demonstrated that when a pharmacist is given time and responsibility for this process a
substantial reduction in errors can be achieved. It is important a pharmacist has influence over
all health professionals in this process, we had little direct influence over surgery procedures
during the initial stage of our audit and note the number of prescription errors remained high. A
root cause analysis was undertaken establishing the origin of the majority of surgery errors and
we are now taking a more proactive role in the prescribing process. The use and accuracy of
MAR charts requires constant review, a labour intensive process, which needs protected time
and associated funding 1 . We hope this audit will provide data and evidence to persuade
commissioners of the urgent need for this type of pharmaceutical care.
REFERENCES
1 Dean B, Barber N et al. Care homes’ use of medicines study: prevalence, causes and potential
harm of medication errors in care homes for older people. Qual Saf Health Care 2009;18:341-
346
2 Department of Health. The use of medicines in care homes for older people. DH Alert
(2010)001
3 Dean B, Barber N. A validated, reliable method of scoring severity of medication errors. Am J
Health System Pharm 1999;56:57-62