Our medicines safety optimisation and improvement programme aims to help patients get the maximum benefit from their medicines and reduce waste.
Each area of work in this programme intends to make medicines safety part of routine practice, ensure medicines use is as safe as possible and understand the patients’ experience.
Working closely with primary care, we are focusing on a number of key areas:
- Increased use of electronic Repeat Dispensing (known as eRD)
- Reducing reliance of Medicines Compliance Aids (MCAs)
- Between 2018/20, as one of the AHSN Network’s seven national programmes, improving transfers of care between hospital and local pharmacists (known as TCAM) and care home teams
- Between 2018/20, as one of the AHSN Network’s seven national programmes, reducing prescribing errors in general practice through Pharmacist-led INformation technology intervention for reducing Clinically important Errors (PINCER)
The West of England AHSN are the regional agents for the delivery of the national Medicines Safety Improvement Programme (MedSIP). Read more about the Medicines Safety Improvement Programme here.
Our commission has an overarching aim to reduce medication related harm in Health and Social Care, focusing on high risk drugs, situations and vulnerable patients. The programme will contribute to the WHO Challenge target (2017) to reduce severe avoidable medication related harm globally by 50% over five years. Our initial focus is on two primary drivers; improve the safety of medicines administrations in care homes and reduce inappropriate high-dose opiate prescriptions for non-cancer pain.
