A medication safety incident is defined as an unexpected or unintended incident which could have, or which did lead to any harm to one or more patients. Medication safety incidents can occur at any stage of the process involved in the delivery of medicines to patients. These stages could range from prescribing medications (which includes transcribing or the physicians ordering medicines), dispensing, preparation, administration and monitoring of the medications. Similarly, in the ambulatory settings, the patients who are the ultimate users of drugs can also make errors at any stage of medicine use. The outcomes of the errors may range from mild inconvenience to the patient to even fatal toxic reactions. Therefore, methods need to be employed to detect the occurrence of such errors.

Medvarsity and International Society for Quality in Health Care (ISQua), have together created a flexible, online education program on medication safety. This “Specialist Certificate Course in Medication Safety” covers right from introduction to medication safety to using unit huddles to reduce adverse drug events.

Course Objectives

The Learning Objectives of this course are to:

• Define and articulate the terminology and the main concepts in the context of medication safety
• Describe WHO’S Third Global Challenge
• Describe strategies to evaluate the effectiveness of policies that are designed to improve medication safety
• Outline the risks and benefits of technology on medication
• Describe how to involve regulative authority and pharmaceutical industry for medication safety.
• Articulate key approaches for addressing prescribing and dispensing errors
• List out few strategies to handle high-risk medicines to improve medication safety
• Define medication reconciliation

Course Outline:

The specialist certificate course in medication safety covers the following topics:

• WHO’s Third Global Challenge
• Improving Medication Safety on Policy Level
• Detecting Medication Errors and Analyzing Medication Error Incident Reports
• Reporting and Learning Systems for Medication Errors
• Understanding Challenges in the Safe Use of Medications
• High-Risk Medicines
• Patients’ Experience in Understanding the Instructions for Medications
• Interventions for the Safe Administration of Medications

Course Validity

• 3 months. There will be an extra charge for the extension of the course validity.

Eligibility

• Any graduate
• Doctors, nurses, pharmacists, pharmacy managers, quality officers, patient safety officers, quality and safety managers, administrators, improvement advisors/consultants and quality specialists whose prime focus includes improving healthcare quality will benefit from this course.

Assessments

• Online reflective learning assessments. The learner is tasked with applying the learning to one or more case studies or situations.

Certification

• On completion of all course modules and assessments, successful candidates will receive a “Specialist Certificate in Medication Safety”, jointly from Medvarsity and ISQua.