The Prepare Study
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Prescribing Error Reporting: Facilitating learning and patient safety across primary care (Prepare)
IRAS ID
266348
Contact name
G Donovan
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Sunderland
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 5 months, 21 days
Research summary
Improving patient safety is a key priority worldwide. It is estimated that 237.4 million medication errors occur in England every year. Medication errors vary widely in their potential to cause harm and can occur when medicines are being prescribed, dispensed or monitored.
Medication error reporting allows identification of patterns in the errors being made that can help support shared learning and the prevention of future harm. However, the decision to report medication errors is a complex process with many barriers. Prescribing errors originating from general practice and other community health services are often identified and rectified within community pharmacy, yet evidence suggests these are often not reported in either setting. Organisational structures within the NHS do not always support feedback and learning across these settings.
A clearer understanding is needed of the types of prescribing errors that would benefit from being reported, as well as potential solutions to more systematic and efficient cross-organisational learning. This study will employ interviews with primary care prescribers, community pharmacy health professionals and other key stakeholders to identify facilitators and barriers to identifying and reporting prescribing errors in primary care. We will also assess the wider influence of the healthcare context on beliefs about which types of errors should be reported and where.
Findings will be fed-back directly to local and national groups that deal with medication safety. They will also be disseminated to the NHS department responsible for developing new technologies and approaches for supporting error reporting across the NHS. Findings will be submitted for publication in academic journals, and will inform the development of a NIHR funding proposal to implement and evaluate identified solutions. We will develop appropriate ways of disseminating the study findings to the public with advice from a public and patient reference group and the study collaborators.
REC name
N/A
REC reference
N/A