Medication safety project
NHS Direct is working with the NIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) for Northwest London and the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust on a medication safety project which seeks to identify and resolve medicine related problems experienced by patients discharged from hospital.
Reducing readmissions
This work is extremely timely given the Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley’s recent announcement that hospitals should be responsible for reducing the number of emergency readmissions following treatment, and support treatment at home, as part of a single payment. The medication safety project aims to do just that by ensuring patients receive appropriate information about and support for the medication they have been prescribed.
The first two phases of the project have now been completed. Phase 1 involved a review of 500 patient calls to the hospital’s medicines helpline post discharge. This identified the most frequently asked questions they had about their medicines. 22% of calls were about medication side effects, 22% about possible interactions and 21% about directions on how to take their medication.
A random sample of 500 medicines calls to NHS Direct over a similar time period have also been analysed to provide a comparison and similar trends are emerging.
Phase 2 of the project covered a review of patients’ medication from admission through to discharge. This has identified a number of practices which required improvement and new measures have been put in place around communication between staff, documentation of medicines for discharge, and discharge information for the GP and the patient.
Patients are reassured
The third phase of the project started in January 2010, with NHS Direct pharmacists making calls to patients who had recently been discharged from the Acute Medical Unit at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London. To date, over 50 patients have been called by NHS Direct pharmacists to follow up medicines related problems post discharge. Some patterns are already emerging.
Patients are:
- Reassured that they can ask questions about their medication which have arisen since leaving hospital.
- Unsure why some of their medicines may have been stopped/changed after discharge.
- Wanting to check if they still need to take the medicines they had left at home.
- Uncertain what information their GP will have following their stay in hospital.
- Unsure whether they need to continue taking antibiotics after their current course is finished.
This phase of the project will continue until September 2010 when progress will be reviewed.
Ganesh Sathyamoorthy, Head of Operations and Delivery, NIHR CLAHRC for Northwest London said:
“This is a dynamic project working at an interface of care between Acute services and NHS Direct and has already delivered tangible service improvements. A poster presentation of this project won first prize at the Service and Delivery Organisation conference, 2nd -3rd June 2010”.
For further information about the medication safety project, please contact Anne Joshua, Associate Director of Pharmacy at anne.joshua@nhsdirect.nhs.uk
