Celebrate Patient Safety Awareness Week with ASHP

ASHP is the leading provider of medication safety education, tools, and resources — from sterile compounding guidelines to a medication safety certificate to a just culture toolkit.

We advocate for medication safety initiatives, such as improved labeling and packaging, and our Center of Excellence certification in Medication-use Safety and Pharmacy Practice recognizes hospitals that achieve high safety standards.

As you look for ways to mark National Patient Safety Week (March 10–16), tap into these ASHP resources. 

Ideas for Celebrating Patient Safety Awareness Week

The pharmacy team is the ideal choice to lead efforts that highlight medication safety. ASHP members offer plenty of ideas, including an award ceremony for good catches by providers, a grand rounds presentation on medication safety, and a virtual pharmacy tour to showcase your team’s role in patient safety.

You can also listen to this 10-minute podcast from members of the Section of Inpatient Care’s Advisory Group on Medication Safety to hear their favorite ways to celebrate the week.

Coming Soon: An Updated Medication Safety Resource Center

Our one-stop medication safety center is getting an overhaul — stay tuned for an announcement when it goes live in coming weeks! In the meantime, check out the ASHP resources, including best practices, guidelines, policies, and content that are collected there.

To name just a few, we have a podcast series on medication safety, our medication safety program tool, guidelines on adverse drug reactions, and ASHP’s statement on bar-code verification. You can also read the medication safety-related policy positions that ASHP’s House of Delegates has adopted in recent years.

ASHP Pharmacy Futures 2024 — Patient Safety Programming

Our upcoming Pharmacy Futures meeting in June offers clinical programming on patient safety. 

Sessions include ISMP 2024: Forward Facing Strategies for the Future of Medication Safety, which will explore the effects of artificial intelligence on patient safety.

Another session, Psychological Safety and Just Culture: Future Focus for Organizational Well-Being, features national safety expert David Marx, who will discuss strategies for incorporating psychological safety into your organization’s plan to protect the workforce. 

And leaders from Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio will lead a peer support workshop on responding to second victims, healthcare providers who suffer emotional trauma after making a medical error.  

Compounding Resource Center

ASHP’s Compounding Resource Center is a collection of tools to support the knowledge and skills of pharmacists and technicians who compound sterile and nonsterile medications. Following guidelines and understanding the risks associated with compounding are critical to medication and patient safety.

Standardize 4 Safety (S4S) Initiative

Funded by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and led by ASHP, S4S was the first national, interprofessional effort to standardize medication concentrations.

Hospitals are encouraged to adopt these standards for intravenous and oral liquid medications to reduce the chance of medication errors, particularly during transitions of care. As part of the latest S4S updates, ASHP is accepting comments on draft standards for intermittent infusions for adults and children. 

AJHP’s Medication Safety Articles

We’ve published numerous research papers on medication safety over the years. Consider a few of these recent articles:

• Admission medication history quality: Considering nonprescription medications, limited English proficiency, and medication history sources
• Pharmacy-driven performance improvement initiative to increase compliance with intravenous smart pump drug error reduction systems at a large urban academic medical center
• Long-term outcomes and adverse effects of teduglutide in patients with short bowel syndrome: Highlighting hyperamylasemia and hyperlipasemia

Help for Your Patients

ASHP developed SafeMedication.com as a source of consumer-friendly information about prescription and over-the-counter medications. Written by pharmacists, the easy-to-read articles include information about vaccines, tips for taking medications, and answers to common safety questions.