Medication Safety Incidents increase at LUH – HIQA Report

HIQA says further improvements are needed in the area of Medication Safety at Letterkenny University Hospital.
Some improvements have been made since an inspection last year, but HIQA says essential elements required for medication safety were not present, and the inspectors are not assured that the hospital had clear plans to implement these.
The report says in 2017, a total of 222 medication safety incidents were reported. Medication safety incident reporting had improved since the last inspection, and the number of reported incidents has increased in 2018, with 197 incidents reported for the first six months of this year.
The majority of medication safety incidents were reported by clinical pharmacists on wards to which they were assigned, with the HIQA inspectors finding that despite the overall increase in incident reporting, underreporting of medication incidents was especially evident in wards without clinical pharmacists.
The report says improvements were evident during the inspection in June, but there has been limited progress in relation to addressing areas for improvement identified during a medication safety inspection in August last year.
The hospital had put governance structures in place, but the inspectors found the essential elements required for an effective medication safety programme were still lacking at Letterkenny University Hospital.
The full report can be viewed HERE