The College is pleased to announce the official launch of Safety IQ, Manitoba’s community pharmacy continuous quality improvement (CQI) program. Safety IQ aims to prevent and learn from medication mistakes that may happen when prescriptions are prepared and/or provided to patients in community pharmacies.
CQI in community pharmacy focuses on preventing medication errors and continually looking for ways to improve medication dispensing, therapy management, and counselling. Safety IQ is an approach to patient safety that recognizes there is always room for improvement. It’s about making a safe system even safer.
Much time and effort has been spent on implementing Safety IQ. What began as a pilot with twenty community pharmacies in 2017 has grown into a mandatory program for all 441 community pharmacies and counting in 2021. The College and Council would like to extend our appreciation to the many individuals who have contributed to this process:
- Melissa Sheldrick, Patient Safety Advocate for her encouragement and support of Safety IQ and the Community Pharmacy Safety Culture Toolkit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0p47ThUcoQ
- The Safety IQ pilot pharmacy managers and pharmacy staff who initially tested the concepts of Safety IQ and provided their feedback for changes to the provincial program.
- The Safety IQ Advisory Committee who worked to develop the provincial requirements for Safety IQ and incorporated these into the updated Medication Incidents and Near Miss Events Practice Direction in conjunction with the Standards of Practice Division of the Quality Assurance Committee.
- The pharmacy managers, district/regional managers and corporate pharmacies who have worked during these challenging times to integrate an online reporting platform into their pharmacies.
- The various online reporting platform organizations as well as the National Incident Data Repository for their collaboration with the College and pharmacies to work towards the national sharing of incident information and learnings to improve patient safety across the country.
Pharmacy professionals must now report all medication incident and near-miss events to their pharmacy’s medication incident reporting platform. For a quick guide to reporting, please see the following resource: https://cphm.ca/resource/quick-guide-reporting/
Pharmacy managers must train their staff on the elements of Safety IQ and the pharmacy’s medication incident reporting platform by September 1, 2021; however, the following resources are available for review at any time:
- Safety IQ Quick Guide: Reporting Medication Incidents and Near-Miss Events
- Medication Incident and Near-Miss Event Practice Direction
- Introduction to Safety IQ: Overview and Implementation (video)
- Safety IQ Frequently Asked Questions
Ultimately, Safety IQ aims to improve medication safety for all Manitobans and each of us has a role to play. We must continually ask ourselves ‘how are we doing?’ and ‘how can we do it better?’
Over the coming weeks and months, the College will release new resources to support CQI in community pharmacies. If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at safetyiq@cphm.ca.