NHS trust to recirculate out-of-hours medicines access process following prisoner death Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust also confirmed that training sessions will continue to reinforce staff understanding in response to a coroner's prevention of future deaths report.…
Escalation pathways for complex anticoagulation introduced after patient death A patient died from prosthetic aortic valve thrombosis with sub-therapeutic anticoagulation, after clinicians were unable to keep her international normalised ratio within a therapeutic range.…
Test your knowledge of medicines safety Our self-assessment quiz covers the principles of medicines safety and some scenarios that pharmacists might encounter in daily practice.…
Government ‘examining’ medication pack barcode requirements Exclusive: The Department of Health and Social Care has told The Pharmaceutical Journal that since “patient safety is paramount”, it will investigate which barcodes are required on medicines packaging.…
Barcode issues disrupting pharmacy work at more than half of NHS trusts A survey has also revealed that nearly two-thirds of respondents reported that they received medicines without barcodes in the previous month.…
Incretin-based weight-loss drugs should not be deliberately continued in pregnancy, consensus guidelines state The guidelines have been drawn up by a multidisciplinary group of experts following a systematic scoping review.…
How pharmacists can transform prescribing safety in psychiatry Medication errors disproportionately affect patients with mental illness but pharmacists’ expertise in psychopharmacology could help tailor prescribing to better meet individual patient needs.…
Best practice for prescribing drugs with dependence potential An overview of the considerations for prescribing medicines with the risk of dependency, including monitoring, discontinuation and the optimisation of therapeutic outcomes.…
Digital systems in general practice could reduce medication errors Across the 74 randomised controlled trials under review, the most frequent intervention component was clinical decision support systems, which was mentioned in 59 papers.…
How pharmacists are storing medicines in soaring temperatures What is being done to ensure hospitals can store medicines safely as heatwaves become more prevalent and what steps are pharmacists taking to maintain medicines integrity in the short term?…
