The Department of Health and Social Care have published a Short Life Working Group report on reducing medication-related harm. The report, which was informed by a review of the evidence on medication errors in England produced by the Policy Research Unit in Economic Evaluation of Health and Care Interventions (EEPRU), makes recommendations for a programme of work to tackle medication error Continue Reading »

The Medicines Use and Safety Division of the Specialist Pharmacy Service (SPS) have published a March 2018 update on the SPS website with information on a range of topics, including: Recent Resources Collaborative Audits Work in Progress Network Events Publications The Network Events section includes details of a forthcoming meeting dedicated to Delivering the WHO “Medication With Out Harm” Patient Safety Continue Reading »

The 2018 update of NICE ‘medicines optimisation: key therapeutic topics‘ has been published. The evidence context for all the current topics has been updated in the light of new guidance and important new evidence. 14 topics from 2017 have been retained: multimorbidity and polypharmacy psychotropic medicines in people with learning disabilities whose behaviour challenges safer insulin prescribing medicines optimisation in long-term Continue Reading »

The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) and the MHRA Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) have developed confidential bespoke practice and patient-level drug prescribing reports, available for free for GP practices contributing to CPRD. The reports focus on prescribing and patient safety, allowing practices to benchmark themselves against others contributing to CPRD. The reports can be used for appraisal (under Continue Reading »