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Found 1,161 results
  1. Content Article
    This article* is an update from Dr Henrietta Hughes, Patient Safety Commissioner for England.
  2. Content Article
    In the US, patients receiving cancer treatment via Medicare or Medicaid—two federal health insurance programmes—can face barriers to accessing treatment when insurers use the Prior Authorization Process to deny access. In this letter to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Community Oncology Alliance (COA) outlines its concerns that prior authorizations are acting as "roadblocks to Americans with cancer getting the optimal treatment on a timely basis." Referring to proposed rule changes that aim to reduce the burden that prior authorization processes place on providers, the COA calls for the inclusion of medications to ensure that American's with cancer are not denied the treatment they need.
  3. Content Article
    NHS England working in partnership with integrated care system (ICS) leads and representatives, has devised actions to help systems develop plans that can support people who are taking medicines associated with dependence and withdrawal symptoms. The actions will support ICSs to deliver on their 4 key objectives of: improving outcomes in population health and healthcare tackling health inequalities in outcomes, experience and access enhancing productivity and value for money helping the NHS support broader social and economic development.
  4. Content Article
    In a series of blogs for the hub, we will be highlighting the impact fatigue has on staff and patients. In their first blog, Emma Plunkett and Nancy Redfern, part of the Joint Working Group on Fatigue, shared how they became involved in investigating night shift fatigue, setting up the Joint Working Group on Fatigue and the aims of the #FightFatigue campaign. In this second blog, Emma and Nancy are joined by Roopa McCrossan to highlight how tiredness can impact on our performance, the patient and staff implications of fatigue, and the actions that need to be taken not only at an organisational level to improve culture, but the effort required at national level too.
  5. Content Article
    In this video interview, consultant geriatrician Dr Elena Mucci talks about patient safety in geriatrics and end of life care. She describes the importance of: taking a whole-person approach to caring for older people reviewing medications regularly equipping patients to manage their own health. engaging patients and their families in planning for end of life care at an early stage Elena also explains how she is sharing these messages with both patients and healthcare professionals.
  6. Content Article
    The purpose of this study, published in Archives of Disease in Childhood, was to determine the incidence and nature of prescribing and medication administration errors in paediatric inpatients. Authors conclude that prescribing and medication administration errors are not uncommon in paediatrics, partly as a result of the extra challenges in prescribing and administering medication to this patient group. The causes and extent of these errors need to be explored locally and improvement strategies pursued.
  7. Content Article
    The purpose of this study, published in Intensive Care Medicine, was to establish the baseline prescribing error rate in a tertiary paediatric intensive care unit (PICU) and to determine the impact of a zero tolerance prescribing (ZTP) policy incorporating a dedicated prescribing area and daily feedback of prescribing errors.
  8. Content Article
    A UK national survey of primary care physicians has indicated that the medication information on hospital discharge summary was incomplete or inaccurate most of the time. Internationally, studies have shown that hospital pharmacist's interventions reduce these discrepancies in the adult population. There have been no published studies on the incidence and severity of the discrepancies of the medication prescribed for children specifically at discharge to date. The objectives of this study, published in International Journal of Pharmacy Practice, were to investigate the incidence, nature and potential clinical severity of medication discrepancies at the point of hospital discharge in a paediatric setting.
  9. Content Article
    Iatrogenic injuries, including medication errors, are an important problem in all hospitalized populations. However, few epidemiological data are available regarding medication errors in the paediatric inpatient setting. The objectives of this paper, published in JAMA, were to assess the rates of medication errors, adverse drug events (ADEs), and potential ADEs; to compare paediatric rates with previously reported adult rates; to analyse the major types of errors; and to evaluate the potential impact of prevention strategies.
  10. Content Article
    In September 2017 the Short Life Working Group (SLWG) was established. The purpose of this group was to advise on the scope of a programme to improve safety in the use of medicines, including how to reduce medication errors and establish the best way to measure progress. The objectives of the group were to: In the context of the WHO Global Patient Safety Challenge Medication Without Harm, advise on the overall strategy and programme required to drive improvement in medicines safety, drawing on work underway across NHS England, NHS Improvement, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and in the NHS and academia. Identify those areas in which efforts need to be targeted in the short, medium and long-term. Provide clinical and academic expertise and advice on the current barriers and issues in medicines safety, and how these can be overcome. Advise on the best ways to measure medication errors and medication safety. This report outlines the main areas of discussion by the group, and although it is not all-encompassing, the report highlights key recommendations for improvement in medicines safety.
  11. Content Article
    In this blog, TranspariMED Founder Till Bruckner reviews The Truth Pill: The Myth of Drug Regulation in India, a new book that looks at problems with the medications regulatory system in India. The book's authors, Dinesh S. Thakur and Prashant Reddy T, draw on in-depth legal and regulatory analyses, numerous case studies and responses to hundreds of Freedom of Information requests to document glaring gaps in India’s legal framework and severe shortcomings in regulatory oversight and enforcement.
  12. Content Article
    This report looks into the circumstances surrounding the deaths of three young adults; Joanna, Jon and Ben. They each had learning disabilities, were patients at Cawston Park Hospital and died within a 27 month period (April 2018 to July 2020). It highlights multiple significant failures in care, including excessive use of restraint and seclusion, overmedication of patients, lack of record keeping and the physical assault of patients. The report also makes a series of recommendations for critical system and strategic change, both at a local and national level.
  13. News Article
    Scarlet fever cases have surged by tenfold in a year, official data shows, as pharmacists grapple with a shortage of antibiotics during a Strep A outbreak. Strep A bacteria usually only causes mild illness, including scarlet fever and strep throat, which is treated with antibiotics. But in rare cases, it can progress into a potentially life-threatening disease if it gets into the bloodstream. Infections are higher than normal for this time of year, and at least nine children have died after contracting the bacteria in recent weeks. Pharmacists say they are struggling to get their hands on antibiotics to treat Strep A infections – despite the government insisting there is no shortage. “We are worried because we are having to turn patients away,” said Dr Leyla Hannbeck, the head of the Association of Multiple Pharmacies (AIMP). Read more Source: The Independent, 8 December 2022
  14. News Article
    Antibiotics could be given to children at schools affected by Strep A to stop the spread of the infection, schools minister Nick Gibb has said. Mr Gibb told Sky News that the UK Health and Security Agency (UKHSA) is "working closely with the schools involved and giving very specific advice to those schools which may involve the use of penicillin". He added that health officials will "have more to say about that". "They're providing more general advice to parents, which is to look out for the symptoms - so, sore throat, fever, high temperature and also a red or raised rash on the skin are symptoms of this invasive Strep A outbreak." His comments came after the ninth death of a child from the infection. Read full story Source: Sky News, 6 December 2022
  15. News Article
    The World Health Organization (WHO) announces that the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, Republic of Korea, has achieved maturity level four (ML4), the highest level in WHO’s classification of regulatory authorities for medical products. WHO has formally assessed the medical product regulatory authorities of 33 countries, of which only the Republic of Korea is listed as attaining this level in regulation for both locally produced as well as imported medicines and vaccines. This achievement represents an important milestone for the Republic of Korea and for the world, signifying that the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS), the national regulatory authority for medicines and vaccines, is operating at an advanced level of performance with continuous improvement Only about 30% of the world’s regulatory authorities have the capacity to ensure medicines, vaccines and other health products are produced to required standards, work as intended and do not harm patients. WHO’s benchmarking efforts identify regulatory authorities that are operating at an advanced level so that they can act as a reference point for regulatory authorities that lack the resources to perform all necessary regulatory functions, or which have not yet reached higher maturity levels for medical product oversight. “This is a great testament for Republic of Korea’s commitment for ensuring safe and effective medicines and vaccines, and investing in building a strong regulatory system,” said Dr Mariângela Simão, Assistant Director-General, Access to Medicines and Health Products. “We hope the achievement will be sustained and also help promote confidence, trust and further reliance on national authorities attaining this high level”. Read full story Source: WHO, 29 November 2022
  16. News Article
    With flu cases rising, UK Covid scientists are turning their attention to finding the best life-saving drugs to fight the winter virus. A trial will run across 150 hospitals this year and next, recruiting thousands of patients. Flu vaccines help prevent infection but each year some people become very sick. And antiviral tablets - given within a couple of days of symptoms developing - are designed to reduce the severity of these bad infections. One of the pills the Imperial College London team will be testing is oseltamivir, or Tamiflu. It is recommended to treat severe flu - but whether it saves lives is unclear. Funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research, the Randomised, Embedded, Multi-factorial, Adaptive Platform Trial for Community-Acquired Pneumonia (Remap-Cap) will study how good the treatments are at reducing deaths and intensive care admissions. Chief investigator Prof Anthony Gordon told BBC News: "We want to learn at pace what works, just like we did during Covid. "We'll test multiple treatments in different combinations. Some are antivirals that stop the virus, others are steroids or other treatments that work on how the body responds to infections. "We hope that our trial will help to find urgently needed flu treatments rapidly. Our Covid trial changed clinical practice globally and we hope we can impact flu treatment and reduce winter pressures on the NHS in the same way." Read full story Source: BBC News, 29 November 2022
  17. News Article
    Patients in Oklahoma, USA, who get their prescription medications by mail may soon have better protections for the safety of those drugs than any other state. On Wednesday, Oklahoma regulators proposed the nation’s first detailed rule to control temperatures during shipping, according to pharmacy experts. “This is a huge step,” said Marty Hendrick, executive director of the Oklahoma State Board of Pharmacy, after the board voted to approve the rule Wednesday. “We’ve got a tremendous amount of prescriptions that get mailed to patients. … What we did today was make sure our patients in Oklahoma are receiving safe products.” Exposure to extreme temperatures can degrade or weaken drugs, potentially changing their dosage or chemical makeup and rendering them ineffective or unsafe for patients. But while government oversight of how pharmacies store medications to keep them in defined safe temperature ranges is very detailed, an NBC News investigation in 2020 found oversight of shipping to patients — during which drugs might be exposed to heat waves and below-freezing temperatures — is largely a system of blind trust. Mail-order pharmacy is a booming business, with soaring profits for some of the nation’s largest companies last year and more than 26 million people receiving their medication by mail in 2017 — more than double the number two decades earlier, according to federal data. NBC News found that most state pharmacy boards, the regulators responsible for pharmacy safety, did not have specific rules for how pharmacies should ship customers’ medication, few asked about this process in their inspections, and many said it was simply up to the pharmacy to ensure safe shipping. Read full story Source: NBC News, 17 November 2022
  18. News Article
    Poison control centres in the USA have seen an increase in reports of children ingesting a type of prescription cough medicine, a study published by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)found. From 2010 through 2018, reports of paediatric poisonings involving the drug, benzonatate, increased each year, the study found. Benzonatate, sold under the brand name Tessalon, is prescribed to treat coughs caused by colds or the flu. It is not approved for children younger than 10 years old. The findings, published in the journal Pediatrics, were based on more than 4,600 cases reported to poison control centres. The reports included children who were unintentionally exposed to the drug, as well as children who abused or misused it intentionally. The proportion of cases with serious adverse effects was low. However, accidental or inappropriate use of benzonatate, which comes in gel capsules, can lead to serious health problems in children, including convulsions, cardiac arrest and death. The findings should galvanise doctors to be more careful when they prescribe these kinds of medications, said study author Dr. Ivone Kim, a pediatrician and senior medical officer at the FDA. Cough medications "should be treated like any other medication that can have serious side effects," Ameenuddin said, "which means not giving it to children without specific medical direction." Read full story Source: NBC News, 15 November 2022
  19. News Article
    The antibody drug Evusheld is effective for protecting clinically extremely vulnerable people from Covid-19, including its omicron variants, a preprint study has reported. The prophylactic treatment, manufactured by AstraZeneca, is a combination of two long acting antibodies (tixagevimab and cilgavimab). It is given as two separate, sequential intramuscular injections in the same session and can be administered in the community. A research team, led by the University of Birmingham alongside academics from King’s College London and the UK Health Security Agency, carried out a systematic review and meta-analysis to examine its effectiveness in immunocompromised patients. The paper examined the outcomes among 24 773 immunocompromised participants across 17 international studies, 10 775 of whom received Evusheld. Overall, it reported that the treatment was 86% effective for preventing covid specific death, 88% effective in preventing intensive care admission, effective in preventing hospital admission, and 40% effective in preventing Covid-19 infection. The study’s senior investigator, Lennard Lee, senior research fellow at the University of Birmingham and academic medical oncologist at the University of Oxford, said, “There is strong evidence emerging across the world that this approach of using prophylactic antibody therapies in combination with vaccination is a revolutionary approach to safeguard the most vulnerable patients this winter. The science and data suggest that it would be a successful approach for many cancer and immunocompromised patients at the highest level of risk.” Evusheld is already being given to immunocompromised patients in countries including the United States, France, and Israel, but the UK government is waiting for more data on the duration of protection it provides against omicron and its subvariants before deciding whether it should be used. Read full story Source: BMJ, 8 November 2022
  20. News Article
    Responding to a backlash from pain patients in the USA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have released updated guidelines that offer clinicians more flexibility in the way they prescribe opioids for short- and long-term pain. The new recommendations eliminate numerical dose limits and caps on length of treatment for chronic pain patients that had been suggested in the landmark 2016 version of the agency’s advice, which was aimed at curbing the liberal use of the medication and controlling a rampaging opioid epidemic. Those guidelines cautioned doctors that commencing opioid therapy was a momentous decision for patients. Parts of that nonbinding document were widely misinterpreted, resulting in unintended harm to patients who were benefiting from use of opioids without much risk of addiction. Patients reported they were rapidly tapered off medication by doctors or saw their medication abruptly discontinued, the CDC acknowledged in the new document. The new 100 pages of guidance — which remain only recommendations for doctors, nurse practitioners and others authorised to prescribe opioids — emphasize returning the focus to the caregiver and patient deciding on the best course of treatment. Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Washington Post, 3 November 2022
  21. News Article
    A new pill that could prevent pre-eclampsia has become the first pregnancy drug to be fast-tracked for development by the UK’s drug regulator. Scientists at MirZyme Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company, believe they have developed a drug that when given to women from 20 weeks of pregnancy could stop them developing the condition. Pre-eclampsia endangers the lives of thousands of expectant mothers and their babies in the UK each year, and has no therapeutic options. Globally, it affects between 2% and 8% of pregnancies and kills up to half a million babies and 100,000 women a year. MirZyme Therapeutics has been awarded an innovative licensing and access pathway (ILAP), or so-called innovation passport, by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). The passport was established in January 2021 to expedite access to essential new drugs at the height of the Covid pandemic. It is granted to medicines that address the needs of patients with life-threatening and unmet medical needs, with a view to getting the drug to the market as quickly as possible. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 8 November 2022
  22. News Article
    GPs are breaching medical guidelines by prescribing antidepressants for children as young as 11 who cannot get other help for their mental health problems, NHS-funded research reveals. Official guidance says that under-18s should only be given the drugs in conjunction with talking therapies and after being assessed by a psychiatrist. But family doctors in England are “often” writing prescriptions for antidepressants for that age group even though such youngsters have not yet seen a psychiatrist, according to a report by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), the NHS research body. The report linked the prescriptions to the long wait many young people, some self-harming or suicidal, face before starting treatment with NHS child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS). Under-18s are prescribed the drugs for anxiety, depression, pain and bedwetting. The guidance on antidepressants has been issued by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which advises the NHS on which treatments are effective. Referencing NICE’s recommendation of a two-step approval process, the NIHR study said “this often” did not happen. “No antidepressants are licensed in the UK for anxiety in children and teenagers under 18 years, except for obsessive compulsive disorder. Yet both specialists [psychiatrists] and GPs prescribe them. Thousands of children and teenagers in the UK are taking antidepressants for depression and anxiety. The numbers continue to rise and many have not seen a specialist.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 4 November 2022
  23. News Article
    Theresa May has urged the government to consider “redress” for the victims of a hormone pregnancy test blamed for causing serious birth defects. The former prime minister said that while Primodos victims had received an apology, “lives have suffered as a result” of the drug’s use. In an interview for a Sky News documentary, she praised campaigners who had been “beating their head against a brick wall of the state” which tried to “stop them in their tracks”. A review in 2017 found that scientific evidence did “not support a causal association” between the use of hormone pregnancy tests such as Primodos and birth defects or miscarriage. But Ms May ordered a second review in 2018, because, she said, she felt that it “wasn’t the slam-dunk answer that people said it was”. “At one point it says that they could not find a causal association between Primodos and congenital anomalies, but neither could they categorically say that there was no causal link,” she said. The second review concluded last month that there had been “avoidable harm” caused by Primodos and two other products – sodium valproate and vaginal mesh. An interview for Bitter Pill: Primodos, which will air on Sky Documentaries, Ms May said: “I think it’s important that the government looks at the whole question of redress and about how that redress can be brought up for people. Read full story Source: The Independent, 28 August 2020
  24. News Article
    A senior coroner has demanded action by Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, to ensure that GPs monitor repeat prescriptions properly, after an 84 year old man with dementia died from an overdose of tramadol. Peter Cole, who was found collapsed at his home in Welwyn in Hertfordshire by a neighbour, had amassed a large quantity of unused prescription drugs at his house. He had numerous drugs on repeat prescription, said Geoffrey Sullivan, chief coroner for Hertfordshire. Read full story (paywalled) Source: BMJ, 5 August 2020
  25. News Article
    Antibiotic resistance is an increasing challenge for modern medicine as more naturally occurring antimicrobials are needed to tackle infections capable of resisting treatments currently in use. New research from the University of Warwick has investigated natural remedies to fill the gap in the antibiotic market, taking their cue from a 1,000-year-old text known as Bald's Leechbook. Read the full article here.
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