Patient Counselling in the Secondary Care or Safer Medication Handling by Health Care Workers

Dear Colleagues,

For drug therapy to be optimal, the right patient should receive the right dose of the right drug, in the right way, at the right time. Unfortunately, these conditions are often not met in real-life situations, leading to a high number of medication errors. These errors can be clinically inconsequential or be seriously harmful to patients resulting in hospitalization, life-threatening situations, disability, or even death. Nevertheless, they also represent an economic burden, a source of trauma for the staff and weaken the patient-healthcare provider relationship. Despite this, they are still widespread, especially during prescription and administration. They are mainly due to deficiencies in training, overwork of the healthcare workers, lack of communication, policies inadequate to the actual practice, lack of consistency in procedures or the absence of pharmaceutical follow-up.

In recent years, medication error management has undergone a positive evolution from a blame-based approach to a systems approach that seeks to identify and address the underlying causes of medication error. Thus, the focus is now on the provision of protocols, tools and resources designed to help decrease medication administration errors such as bar-coding systems, weight-based dosing, double- or triple-checking systems, increased pharmacist involvement, avoiding abbreviations, etc. One of the key points identified to reduce the risk of medication errors is to provide access to critical characteristics of drug during administration, however, the time constraints faced by healthcare professionals require these reminder systems to be concise.

Dr. Piotr Merks
Guest Editor

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• patient safety
• secondary care
• medication handling
• clinical interventions
• clinical pharmacy