Pharmacy (Basel, Switzerland)
-
Expanding pharmacist-driven antimicrobial stewardship efforts in the emergency department (ED) can improve antibiotic management for both admitted and discharged patients. We piloted a pharmacist-driven culture and rapid diagnostic technology (RDT) follow-up program in patients discharged from the ED. This was a single-center, pre- and post-implementation, cohort study examining the impact of a pharmacist-driven culture/RDT follow-up program in the ED. ⋯ There was a significant reduction in fluoroquinolone prescribing in the post-implementation group (18.1% vs. 5.4%, p = 0.036). The proportion of patients who had a repeat ED encounter or hospital admission within 30 days was not significantly different between the pre- and post-implementation groups (15.6 vs. 19.1%, p = 0.78 and 9.4% vs. 7.9%, p = 1.0, respectively). Introduction of a pharmacist culture and RDT follow-up program in the ED reduced time to data review, time to outpatient intervention and outpatient follow-up of fluoroquinolone prescribing.
-
Background: Medications errors (MEs) have been a major concern of healthcare systems worldwide. Voluntary-based incident reporting is the mainstay system to detect such events in many institutions. However, the number of reports can be highly variable across institutions depending on their adoption of the safety culture. ⋯ High-alert medications were reported in 281 out of 624 events (45%). Conclusions: The hospital medication safety reporting program is a great tool to identify system-based issues in the medication management system. This study identified many opportunities for improvement in the medication use system, especially in management of chemotherapy and anticoagulant agents.