NIHR Signal: How often do patient safety incidents occur in primary care worldwide?

An expert commentary is provided on a recent systematic review which investigated how often patient safety incidents occur in primary care and how often these were associated with patient harm.

The authors of the commentary highlight that due to the global breadth and research challenges involved the main value of this primary research is in raising awareness of patient safety in primary care, rather than providing accurate incident figures or making specific recommendations for UK practice.

 

NICE Guidance: Medicines optimisation: the safe and effective use of medicines to enable the best possible outcomes (NG5) provides recommendations about the safe and effective use of medicines.  This includes ensuring use of local and national reporting systems such as the National Reporting and Learning System, reporting all incidents consistently and in a timely manner, using tools such as patient safety alerts and considering assessing the training and education provided to health practitioners to identify and report medicines related patient safety incidents.