Background

Patient safety is a high-priority issue for all professions who care for the health and general well-being of people. Patient safety is defined as the prevention of harm to patients, including through errors of commission and omission (see glossary). This definition implies that pharmacists, as partners in the health care team, take care of patients through the health care system and accept the patient as an active element in this process. Safety of products and care is seen by many patients as a baseline expectation, including all ethical aspects related to health and quality of life. To communicate a better understanding of the benefits and risks of medicines to patients while listening to what they report about their individual experience with medicines is a challenge for the pharmacy profession which has to be met by the education of health care professionals as well as the development of standards of their daily practice.

Over recent years, drug development and drug use have made impressive progress. However, increasing opportunities to cure severe and even rare diseases are accompanied by increased risks of undesired medication-use outcomes, including preventable harm and other adverse drug reactions that are discovered after a drug is approved and used in large populations. This risk is partly due to the concomitant increase of knowledge, data, and information which is increasingly difficult to manage. Ensuring patient safety along this complex process requires not only an integrated team-based approach of all involved parties - patients, physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and other patient care providers - but also a clear definition what and how each of them can contribute based are their unique knowledge, skills, and abilities. In this respect it is also important to develop a “fair blame culture,” meaning that those who give information about errors to identify system errors in order to prevent them cannot be punished for doing so. Instead, the thorough analysis of detected medication and dispensing errors should result in an improvement of the quality chain connecting all health care professionals. Information technology – where it is available - and increasing standardisation of care processes will surely support the quality movement but may also create new causes of errors which have to be analysed as soon as they occur.

It is important to note that the way patient care is delivered and the acute and chronic nature of illness being treated differ among patient care settings, which includes ambulatory settings (physician offices, clinics, and community pharmacies), hospitals, home-care and long-term care facilities, and others. Approaches to ensuring patient safety will differ to varying degrees from one setting to the next. However, the goal of ensuring continuity in the information that is transferred and shared between various providers about the patient, including medications, should be consistent throughout.