Grant: CIHR Café Scientifique Program

Up to one quarter of hospital admissions are due to reactions to medications, called adverse drug events (ADEs). Studies have found that at least 58% ADEs can be prevented. A major reason why preventable ADEs happen is that medication reconciliation is not completed when a patient is discharged from hospital. Medication reconciliation is a process where a patient's health care team compares the list of medications they were taking before hospital admission with the medications they are prescribed at discharge, making sure changes in the list are known by the patient and his or her community physicians and pharmacists. However, this is difficult to do as patients often do not know all the medications they are taking, and patients often go to multiple pharmacies, making it difficult for their health care team to get an accurate community medication list. In Canada, each province keeps a database of all medications given to persons with public drug insurance. Most provinces provide drug insurance for seniors, those at greatest risk of ADEs. Our research group is implementing a new system at the McGill University Health Centre that will show the health care team the patient's complete list of community medications (provided the patient has public drug insurance) directly beside the patient's in-hospital medications. We believe this will allow physicians to write safer discharge prescriptions. Also, changes in a patient's medication list since admission will automatically be faxed to their community pharmacies and physicians. All this is enabled through computerized exchange of information, which requires many safety mechanisms to be in place to protect patient privacy and confidentiality. We propose to hold a Café Scientifique to discuss these topics with the general public. To make these topics accessible and relevant to the general public, we have invited speakers who are both clinicians with work experience as well as research expertise related to medication safety.