Implementation and spread of a simple and effective way to improve the accuracy of medicines reconciliation on discharge: a hospital-based quality improvement project and success story.

Content Provider	Europe PMC
Author	Botros, Shady Dunn, John
Copyright Year	2019
Abstract	BackgroundChanges are often made to medications at times of transitions in care. Inadequate reconciliation during admission, transfer and discharge causes medication errors and increases risks of patient harm. Despite well-established multidisciplinary medicines reconciliation (MR) processes at hospital admission, our MR process at discharge; however, was poor. The main errors included failure to recommence withheld medicines and lack of documentation explaining changes made to medications on discharge. Our objective was to develop an intervention that supports prescribers to follow a simple standardised MR process at discharge to reduce these errors.MethodsWorking closely as a multidisciplinary team, we used improvement methodologies to design and test a process that reliably directs prescribers in surgery to use the inpatient prescribing chart as well as the MR on admission form as sources to create accurate discharge prescriptions. The project was segmented into testing, implementation, spread and sustainability.ResultsThe tested intervention helped the accuracy of discharge prescriptions steadily and quickly improve from 45% to 96% in the pilot ward. Following the successful implementation and sustainability in two separate pilot wards, the intervention was spread to the remaining eight wards producing a similar improvement.ConclusionsTo improve patient safety, it is crucial to ensure that information about medicines is effectively communicated when care is transferred between teams. Although this can be challenging, we’ve shown that it can be done effectively and reliably if this responsibility is equally shared by healthcare professionals from all disciplines while being supported by safe systems that make it easy to do the right thing. Successfully implementing a standardised multidisciplinary MR process at discharge can also reduce the reliance on pharmacists therefore freeing them to undertake other clinical roles.
Journal	BMJ Open Quality
Volume Number	8
PubMed Central reference number	PMC6683109
Issue Number	3
PubMed reference number	31428702
e-ISSN	23996641
DOI	10.1136/bmjoq-2018-000363
Language	English
Publisher	BMJ Publishing Group
Publisher Date	2019-08-01
Publisher Place	BMA House, Tavistock Square, London, WC1H 9JR
Access Restriction	Open
Rights License	This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2019. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.
Subject Keyword	medication reconciliation medication safety pharmacists quality improvement surgery
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Health Policy Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health Leadership and Management