Unsafe medication practices and medication errors are a leading cause of avoidable harm in health care across the world and ‘Medication Safety’ has been selected as the theme for World Patient Safety Day 2022, reaffirming the objectives of the WHO Global Patient Safety Challenge: ‘Medication Without Harm’ launched in 2017. https://www.who.int/campaigns/world-patient-safety-day/2022
This focuses on the priority areas of medication safety: high-risk situations, transitions of care, polypharmacy (concurrent use of multiple medications) and look-alike, sound-alike medications, all particularly applicable to Anaesthesiology.
The European Board of Anaesthesiology responded to this by publishing Recommendations for Safe for Safe Medication Practice. https://journals.lww.com/ejanaesthesiology/Fulltext/2017/01000/The_European_Board_of_Anaesthesiology.2.aspx
The EBA wishes to promote these recommendations to help reduce high burden of medication-related harm due to medication errors and unsafe practices. Additionally, they include a 13-point checklist all hospitals can use to monitor the implementation of these simple and achievable measures.
Prof Oleg Sabelnikovs, EBA President said “According to WHO, medication harm accounts for 50% of the overall preventable harm in medical care and we advocate urgent action through adopting the EBA guidelines to improve medication safety.”
Dr David Whitaker, Chair of the EBA Patient Safety Committee, commenting on the WHO initiative, said: “Great opportunities exist to reduce and remove human factor errors in medication safety through better pharmacy procurement of safer, end-user friendly medicine preparations, avoiding preparations that look and sound alike which can easily be confused with others, using ready-to-administer prefilled syringes and standardisation of work surfaces and medication processes.”
Any enquires about this Press Release please contact EBA Secretariat email: secretary@eba-uems.eu