England:

The National Pharmacy Association (NPA) has held and continues to hold the role of Medication Safety Officer (MSO) for all independent community pharmacies in England with fewer than 50 branches.

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

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.

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