Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

This Forum will bring together stakeholders international and domestic stakeholders to discuss new practices, systems, and technologies in a key area of patient safety: the systematic and comprehensive reporting of medication errors in primary health care. Medication errors are unintended failures in the drug treatment process that lead to actual or potential harm to patients. These errors are a major public health burden. The WHO notes the cost associated with medication errors has been estimated at $42 billion USD annually or almost 1% of total global health expenditure, and that these harms "can be prevented through comprehensive systematic approaches to patient safety." In the EU alone, states the WHO, strategies to reduce such events could lead to "the prevention of more than 750 000 harm-inflicting medical errors per year, leading in turn to over 3.2 million fewer days of hospitalization, 260 000 fewer incidents of permanent disability, and 95 000 fewer deaths per year." The objective of this project is to bring together key stakeholders in Canada, the EU, and US in order to share best practices in the area of patient safety/medication errors in community pharmacies, and to facilitate connections between stakeholder for future development of patient safety strategies. The main activity will consist of a stakeholder forum to compare and contrast processes, institutions, regulations, and technologies that have emerged within the relevant jurisdictions in this area. Participants from academia, government, the private sector, and civil society will be invited in order to share best practices, and to establish constructive collaborative endeavours. The main outputs of this project will be the sharing of cutting-edge regulatory, technological, and training developments in the field of medication error reporting; and the establishment of international learning networks among pharmacists, researchers, and regulators dedicated to quality improvement processes.