Community pharmacy Incident Reporting:

England – Report an incident

Northern Ireland – Report an incident

Scotland – Report an incident

Wales – Report an incident

England:

In September 2014, NHS England (now NHS England & NHS Improvement), and the MHRA, issued a Stage Three Directive recommending all large community pharmacy organisations (as well as NHS Trusts, homecare companies and independent providers) to identify a named Medication Safety Officer (MSO) to review medication incidents and oversee safety improvement. Most of the MSOs in community pharmacy organisations are the Superintendent Pharmacist, or a senior member of their team, and are also the point of contact for safety for their pharmacy teams located outside of England.

The National Pharmacy Association (NPA) also appointed an MSO to fulfil this role for community pharmacies with fewer than 50 branches. Jasmine Shah (Head of Advice & Support Services, NPA) has been appointed to this role currently.

MSO responsibilities for supporting pharmacy businesses and superintendents include:

• Promoting medicines safe use
• Implementing local and national medication safety initiatives
• Improving patient safety on a day-to-day basis
• Submitting incident error reports
• Improving reporting and learning from patient safety incidents
• Responding to requests from the Patient Safety Domain in NHS England and Medicines Healthcare product Regulatory Agency (MHRA) for further information about medication error incidents

The Incident Reporting Platform (IRP): updated user-friendly platform will help you complete incident reporting effectively and in a methodological order – IRP guidance coming soon!

Quality Payments Scheme (QPS) : part of the QPS is the requirement to develop a risk review – a template and example are available for you to use.

Scotland: 

The Medication Safety Service is currently being piloted in Scotland.

Read our guidance for completing the Patient Safety Incident Report form

Read our second patient safety report in 2020 for Scottish members.

Northern Ireland:

A new Patient Safety Incident Reporting tool is now available. Members in Northern Ireland can continue to anonymously report patient incidents to HSCB.

Guidance on completing the new online reporting can be found here.

Community Pharmacy Patient Safety Group

The NPA is a member of the Community Pharmacy Patient Safety Group (CPPSG).

The CPPSG is made up of 19 like-minded people Medication Safety officers (MSOs) with a passion for patient safety. We seek to collaborate and find practical solutions to safety challenges, raise awareness of the importance of reporting, learning and sharing, champion the development of a safety culture and create consistency across community pharmacy.

Access the CPPSG website for further information and resources:  https://pharmacysafety.org/

Patient safety NPA resources, updates and reports:

***Packaging changes for some buprenorphine patches***
Butec and Transtec (buprenorphine) patches will now be supplied in child-resistant sachets, which means the sealed sachets must now be cut with scissors rather than being torn open as previously. The Patient Information Leaflet, and markings on the sachet have been updated to indicate the change.

• Pharmacists and pharmacy teams are advised to counsel patients on this change which will be effective in all new stock bearing serialisation codes