World Patient Safety Day: FAME Pharmacy
FAME celebrates World Patient Safety Day! As an organization committed to patient-centered care, FAME recognizes its duty to the safety of its patients first and works tirelessly to prevent and reduce risks, errors and harm to patients.
This year's theme is Medication Safety. While medications are the most widely utilized interventions in health care, the World Health Organization (WHO) has found that medication-related harm accounts for 50% of the overall preventable harm in medical care.
FAME’s pharmacy is the backbone that strengthens our work, and it plays a critical role in the provision of cost-effective quality pharmaceutical care. With almost 30,000 patient visits in 2021 alone, FAME’s pharmacy stays quite busy!
FAME’s Head Pharmacist, Egbert Chogo, explains how FAME ensures medication safety: by giving the correct prescriptions and developing standard prescribing procedures that are adopted hospital-wide. The FAME pharmacy staff receive weekly training focused on strategies to eliminate pharmacist challenges with prescribing, dispensing and storing medication. As errors can occur at different levels of the medication use process, FAME doctors and nurses are also routinely trained to understand better the conditions they treat and the broad range of impacts that medication has on patients, enabling them to write the correct prescriptions based on individual patient needs and administer the drugs correctly.
FAME is heavily invested in ensuring the proper storage of medicines. Some medicines, such as vaccines, must be kept within a specific temperature range to ensure they do not lose their effectiveness or shorten their shelf life. Storage of such drugs within the required temperature is paramount. On top of having fridges for this exact purpose, FAME’s drug storage room has an air conditioner and internal temperature regulation to ensure the temperature never exceeds 32°F. It is always kept dark and dry, as exposure to light and moisture can accelerate the breakdown of certain medications, reducing efficacy.
“To help reduce the risk of medication errors at FAME, we are guided by the Five Rights of Medical Administration. These help us ensure we give the right drug, dose and route [how the drug is administered] to the right patient and at the right time. While this is not the only thing we consider to ensure medication safety, the five rights play a decisive role in handling medication.”
FAME has an automated system that flags drugs near their expiry date; while it is not a problem for fast-moving drugs such as anti-pain medications, slow-moving medicines such as antimalarials sometimes require the pharmacy to search for another facility to use the stock before expiration.
In such cases, FAME contacts the supplier to negotiate a swap to then be dispensed to health centers that might need them urgently. FAME also works with our neighboring hospitals, Rhotia Health Center and Karatu Lutheran Hospital. FAME’s pharmacists reach out to ask for an exchange of drugs in case their demand is higher. This is guided by the District Pharmacist from the Ministry of Health in Tanzania.
Because of this system and our diligent staff, FAME rarely sees medications go completely unused due to expiration dates. This is just one of the ways we ensure safe medication practices to prevent medication errors and reduce medication-related harm.
FAME continues to invest in medication safety to ensure medicine use is safe and reliable for all, improving patient outcomes and helping FAME fulfill its mission