The International journal of pharmacy practice
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To identify the accessibility of sources of pre-admission medication (PAM) information, to quantify agreement between the PAM list and the 'gold-standard' PAM list (GS-PAML) and to categorise disagreements. ⋯ Community pharmacy and GP staff were identified as the most available and accurate sources of PAM information and should be prioritised when undertaking admission medication reconciliation in a busy clinical environment.
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CONTEXT Electronic prescribing (EP) systems are advocated as a solution to minimise medication errors. Benefits in patient safety are often as a result of some clinical decision support (CDS) within the system. OBJECTIVE To study the characteristics of the CDS alerts generated within a commercially available EP system in use at a tertiary care paediatric hospital in the UK. ⋯ Drug-allergy conflict alerts were the most accepted, and exact drug duplication alerts the least. CONCLUSION We found a high incidence of alert override, which is undesirable but consistent with that reported in the literature. The results suggest that the underlying algorithms for alert generation in many EP systems are not specific and need to be reviewed.
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OBJECTIVES This study aimed to develop a hospital pharmaceutical service model, together with a costing template for unit cost analysis and to analyse unit costs of hospital pharmaceutical services. METHODS The study was designed on the basis of activity-based costing. A model of the services was set up by consensus of the working group. ⋯ CONCLUSIONS Costing and the use of Microsoft Excel can be applied to the development of a costing template for unit cost analysis of hospital pharmaceutical services. This programme can provide accurate unit costs for services. The results can be used when considering pharmacy service reimbursement, efficiency and service development.
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OBJECTIVES The objective of this study was to evaluate the severity and probability of harm of medication errors (MEs) intercepted by an emergency department pharmacist. The phases of the medication-use process where MEs were most likely to be intercepted were determined. METHODS The emergency department was staffed with a full-time pharmacist during the 7-month study period. ⋯ The MEs were most likely to be intercepted during the prescribing phase of the medication-use process (n = 236; 90.1%). CONCLUSIONS A high proportion of MEs intercepted by the emergency department pharmacist are considered to be significant or serious. However, a smaller percentage of these errors are likely to result in patient harm.