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ISMP Medication Safety Best Practices

Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP)
Horsham, Pennsylvania, USA

The ISMP has issued six 2014-15 Targeted Medication Safety Best Practices for hospitals. Developed with the help of leading medication safety experts, and patterned after the Joint Commission’s National Patient Safety Goals, the best practices are designed to help alert hospitals and focus their efforts on errors that cause serious patient harm despite being reported many times in ISMP alerts.

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by Susan Paparella 2/13/2014 11:27:41 AM Independent double checks can be a useful mid-range strategy when applied correctly and used in combination with other error reduction strategies. They are; however, often misused, overused, and misapplied –many times assigned as a management strategy for “all high-alert medications.” Nurses are often the recipient of this “rule,” without due consideration of the time, resources, environment, and other dimensions that will impact their ability to perform these safety checks in the way they are intended. ISMP recognizes the challenges with this approach and has addressed the issues with the use of independent double checks in their Medication Safety Alert! from June 2013. You can access a copy at: www.ismp.org/Newsletters/acutecare/showarticle.aspx?id=51.

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by Pam Lovett 2/6/2014 6:58:26 PM I am an RN on an adult high acuity progressive care unit. We do "double checks" for our insulin doses and now are told to do them for dilaudid. I looked into this and on paper and for our patients safety this makes sense. The problem is there are not enough nurses on the floor or time in the day to do these double checks and people are just walking around the halls or into other patient rooms to find a nurse with a badge and scanning them so they can go give they're medication. I cannot find anywhere on any site that this is addressed? I'm wracking my brain to figure out how we can do this but we just can't the way things are done now. It takes too much time to give meds as it is.

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ISMP Medication Safety Best Practices