Cluttered shelves dispense harm

POORLY managed community pharmacy shelving for pharmaceuticals has been identified as contributory to dispensing errors, in a National Pharmacy Association’s (NPA) patient safety incident report for Scotland.

The untidy shelves, the habit of replacing split strips of tablets back into open boxes of the wrong strength, and selfchecking prescriptions, were among the factors causing almost a quarter of medication errors, the report declared.

Some 23% of patient safety incidents reported between Oct 2018 and Mar 2019 were a result of the “wrong strength” of medicine being dispensed.

Dispensing the wrong medicine was the most common error, accounting for 32% of cases.

Mismatching patients to their medicine caused 19% of errors, 13% resulted from compliance aids and 10% related to deliveries.

See the report at npa.co.uk.