About the project

In response to the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) challenge in 2017; to reduce severe avoidable medication-related harm globally by 50% by 2024, the Medicines Safety Improvement Programme (MedSIP) is one of the 5 quality improvement (QI) priorities under the National Safety improvement programme. An estimated 237 million medication errors occur during the medication process in England every year. With 42% of these occurring in care homes and 92% of these errors occurring during the administration of medicines in care homes. We hope to achieve this overall aim by focussing on safer administration of medicines in a care home using quality improvement methodology.

Project ambitions

The WMAHSN are working to design interventions:

• to reduce the number of interruptions to medicines rounds in care homes,
• to support the implementation of safety huddles with a view to adoption of the interventions by care homes across the region who are willing to engage in a quality improvement project and improve the safety of medicines administration,
• to learn from safety incidents by supporting homes to identify and report medicines safety incidents and also focusing on what has gone well,
• for three-Way Communication, improving the communication between the care home, GP and community pharmacy to minimise potential errors and harm to residents.

The intention behind these interventions is to identify appropriate homes across a breadth of local authorities and systems with varied quality, capacity and capability.

Our work

Case study: Improving safety of medicines administration in a Birmingham Care Home

Find out more

Get in touch with a member of the project team below to find out how you can get involved.