Introducing ISMP’s New Targeted Medication Safety Best Practices for Community Pharmacy: 2023-2024

Join ISMP for a complimentary webinar as we seek to inspire and mobilize practitioners from around the US in the national adoption of specific consensus-based safe practices selected to reduce or e...

International Medication Safety Update

Around the world numerous organizations are tirelessly working to make medication-use systems safer. While the focus of these organizations may differ, they all share a common goal of ensuring that...

Human Factors Role and Considerations in Drug Labeling and Packaging

Human error can be described as a failure of a common sequence of psychological functions that are basic to human behavior. This failure involves perception of the situation, the way these stimuli ...

Call to Action: Experience in Adopting the ENFit System to Guard Against Accidental Tubing Misconnections

Catheter misconnections involving enteral-to-IV tubing are well documented in the patient safety literature.  They often lead to severe consequences for patients and families. Despite the recent ad...

Sterile Compounding Technology: Pharmacy Technicians Lead the Adoption of Best Practices

Over the past 10 years there has been increased growth and maturity in the compounding technology market and an increased uptake by pharmacies in the use of sterile compounding technologies. Pharma...

Lessons Learned about Human Fallibility, System Design, and Justice in the Aftermath of a Fatal Medication Error

Are you troubled by the criminalization of a medical error that recently occurred within a present-day healthcare organization? How do we come to the right conclusions about accountability? Are you...

Engaging the OR and Procedural Areas to Mitigate Risks with Controlled Substance Medications

Workflow processes in ORs and procedural areas can contribute to an environment vulnerable to drug diversion. Broad access to a variety of medications, delays in documentation, rapid patient turn o...

Quantifying the Holistic Costs of Controlled Substance Medication Waste

The availability of opioid medication quantities and doses above what is typically prescribed for patients is a known medication safety and diversion risk because it requires practitioner manipulat...

Diversion is a Threat to Patient Safety: Adopting Best Practices for Safe Management of Controlled Substances

Drug diversion in healthcare is a serious matter, but the extent of the problem is widely unknown because it often not detected or reported. Statistics from the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health...

Important Actions Community Pharmacies Need To Take Now To Reduce Potentially Harmful Dispensing Errors

While healthcare consumers across the US are facing the ever-growing health threat from a fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, there remains another unresolved national problem continuing to gener...

Importance of Premarket Labeling and Packaging Safety Evaluations in Minimizing Postmarket Medication Errors

Medication errors reported by healthcare practitioners to the ISMP National Medication Errors Reporting Program (ISMP MERP) demonstrate the need for the pharmaceutical industry to be more proactive...

ISMP Medication Safety Self Assessment® for Perioperative Settings: How to Obtain the Most Valuable, Accurate, and Useful Results

The perioperative setting is one of the most medication-intensive areas in healthcare, often with more medications administered per patient than in any other patient care setting. The limited use o...