Medication Safety
Recent advances in drug discovery mean that we can now treat more and more diseases. However, the growing complexity of the treatments available means that things do sometimes go wrong. This research area aims to develop and test technologies to make the prescribing, dispensing, administration and monitoring of medication safer.
Highlights of current research
- The evaluation of robotic dispensing for chemotherapy. An automated dispensing machine for the preparation of chemotherapy is currently being tested within the Pharmacy Department at Charing Cross Hospital. We will be assessing the impact of this system on the accuracy of compounding, patients’ waiting times and staff time, and validating it with respect to requirements of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. Our hypothesis is that such technology is safer and is cost-effective in the preparation of doses of high cost intravenous chemotherapy; we wish to find out whether or not this is the case.
- Improving clinical decision-making. Sometimes laboratory tests are carried out but the results are not acted upon in a timely fashion. Our previous research has shown that patient harm relating to medication is often linked to such monitoring errors; our hypothesis is that fewer patients will suffer harm if results outside the desired range are flagged in a timely fashion to those best placed to act on them. Our proposal is to design a reporting system to identify drug levels and associated laboratory values outside a desired range and inform the relevant personnel, and assess its impact on adverse events due to toxicity from drugs such as warfarin, gentamicin and vancomycin.
- Electronic transmission of prescriptions in primary care. A team led by Nick Barber at The School of Pharmacy has been awarded a £746,000 grant from the NHS Connecting for Health Evaluation programme to evaluate the electronic prescription service in primary care. This important project will determine its effects on patient safety, satisfaction with care, work processes, and economics. Professor Bryony Dean Franklin of the CPSSQ is advising on the study of its impact on dispensing errors in community pharmacies.
Project Details
- Using automation to improve controlled drugs management on hospital wards
- The impact of electronic medication administration records on medication safety and nurses’ work
- SafeChemo – assessing technology for chemotherapy compounding
- Evaluation of the electronic prescription service in primary care
- Dispensing errors in UK and US hospitals – a literature review
- Does dosing of tacrolimus based on actual body weight lead to high initial tacrolimus levels in renal transplant recipients?
- Evaluation of the Health Foundation’s Safer Patients Initiative
- Missed doses and causes of missed doses
- Using photoemission spectroscopy to verify infusion concentrations in a UK setting
- Promoting patient safety in antibiotic use using Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA)
- Care Homes Use of Medicines Study (CHUMS)
- Investigating the utility of process modelling software as part of the SafeChemo evaluation
- Use of probiotic Lactobacillus preparation to prevent C.difficile diarrhoea associated with antibiotics: Interrupted time series study
- A comparison of the interventions made by pharmacists attending consultant led ward rounds with those made by pharmacists providing a traditional clinical ward pharmacy service
- An evaluation of the adoption of the NHS Care Record in secondary care
- Reducing the risks associated with look alike, sound alike drugs
- A comparison of commercial information databases used for enquiry answering by medicines information services
- A survey to assess the feasibility of standardising drug infusion concentration used in critical care areas
- What is the potential impact of an electronic alerting system for laboratory results?
- Can simulation be used to design a more efficient hospital pharmacy?