Grant: Fellowship - Priority Announcement: Drug Safety and Effectiveness

An adverse drug event (ADE) is an injury which results from the use of drugs. Every year ADEs cause around 700,000 visits to emergency departments (EDs) and are one of the main reasons for unplanned hospital admissions and death in Canada. A large number of ADEs which are potentially avoidable require hospitalisation and could be due to poor recording by clinicians and communication about ADEs between care providers and also they result in high costs to the Canadian healthcare system. The main goal of proposed post-doctoral research is to support the development of a new electronic system for reporting ADEs which will be integrated into PharmaNet, which is an electronic medication usage system for British Columbia. I will conduct this research project in 3 phases. Phase 1 will examine the reasons why ADEs in EDs are not being recorded and reported in a draft electronic system currently used by clinicians. This will enable me to prepare for Phase 2 of this research project which is to examine the workflow patterns in EDs and directly observe the ways that ADEs are identified, recorded and reported by ED healthcare personnel. These results will be used to further develop the ADE reporting system and an ADE reporting framework for ED settings that will be applied to this research project, and could be applied to other medication usage systems and other jurisdictions. Phase 3 will identify and develop the data fields required for ADEs to be reported accurately in PharmaNet and this will result in an updated version of the ADE reporting system. Therefore, I will evaluate this updated version with clinicians and pharmacists in order to determine if it is appropriate for ADE reporting and if any further modifications are required. Once optimized, the ADE data can be linked to Canadian administrative health databases and used by stakeholders such as health researchers to support research into drug safety and effectiveness.