Risk Management

[sdn1977]

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Recent events have caused me to think of risk management & how it relates to pharmacy.

As students - do you know what quality control & risk management involve for patients? As pharmacists - do you consider risk management when you get pressured & skip a step or two (or do you think about it later????).

ZPack referred to it with regard to National Patient Safety standards. That is primarily a hospital based set of standards. However...I'm thinking about it from a professional standpoint which encompasses all our practice settings - hospital, retail, closed door, consultants. As practioners, we complain about the pressures our employers put on us to handle the drive thru demands or time constraints, we hear about nurses complaints in hospitals about how slow it is for us to deliver the medications - heck - I even quit a job over it!

What is our understanding of risk management & quality control as a profession? What are our responsibilities personally?

I'm just thowing this topic out for discussion....not as a lecture!

I'm curious what exposure students have to this - I had none in school, but that is not unusual - JCAHO was barely a blip on the hospital radar. I'm also curious about how practioners feel about what impact it should have in our personal professional lives & in our professional associations.....just thoughts.....

 

[ZpackSux]

I am obliged to respond. I didn't get any Risk Management training at school. But I did get a hefty dose of JCAHO as a 3rd year pharmacy student interning at CHLA. My lovely manager put me in charge of inservicing the pharmacy department on JCAHO requirement for pharmacy staff.

Risk Management tool I have now is a compilation of JCAHO Medication Management, USP-797, CMS requirements, and NPSG(national patient safety goals) involving goals 1, 2, 3, 7, and 8. This will keep a Pharmacy Director quite busy....

Let's face it. What pharmacist in an academic setting is fluent on this stuff...let alone try to teach it? This is an advanced healthcare management and administravie overkill with good intentions at heart. It's a never ending viscious cycle of P&P revision and modifications. That's why we have 4 full time employees in our Quality Department.

And kids think 3rd year Therapeutics is hard...

 

[ForcedEntry]

I can speak from a FDA 21 CFR Part 820 (Medical Device Manufacturing)perspective...

Risk management is the upper-level clinical hazards to patients and how they are mitigated.

If you identify a new risk that cannot be mitigated with a previous solution, then you are required by law to address it appropriately and document your decision.

IMO: the same actions should be required for the promogulation of pharmacy practices, whether it be in a retail, clinical, or research position. Likewise, I would be shocked if they weren't. That being said, it is the worker bees' responsibility to adhere to the processes utilized by each perspective institution. It is the processes and policies for each institution that are held to the risk management criterium.

How this applies: (time warp to before WAGS had drive-thrus) A group of regulatory, quality, and legal types should have meet to design the drive-thru safely by identifying the risks and mitigating them properly.