Application of Quality Assurance Principles: Teaching Medication Error Reduction Skills in a “Real World” Environment

Abstract

Objectives. To create an instructional sequence that would encourage students to acquire the knowledge, skills, and abilities required to decrease medication errors in the pharmacy practice setting. Methods. A course on medication error reduction was developed for third professional year pharmacy students. Students (N=157) were divided into 30 project teams and assigned to a preceptor in a community or health-system pharmacy. Teams met with their preceptors and, using concepts learned in class, developed site-specific medication error reduction projects. Students collected, analyzed, and evaluated data to measure plan impact, presented their results at a poster forum, and self-evaluated their knowledge, skills, and abilities. Results. Students demonstrated improvement in the following areas: (1) awareness of medication error impact on patient health, (2) motivation to implement methods to decrease errors, (3) knowledge of methods to reduce errors, (4) ability to identify errors, and (5) ability to implement methods to reduce errors. Conclusion. The increased student awareness of the pharmacist's role in medication error reduction and the actual use of error reduction skills will enable them to improve future patient outcomes.

Educating Pharmacy Students to Improve Quality (EPIQ) in Colleges and Schools of Pharmacy

“…18 In addition, research suggests that quality improvement projects have broad applications and can be added to a medication safety class or the IPPE sequence. 10 In general, the EPIQ program positively impacted students' confidence in their ability, knowledge, motivation, and awareness of quality improvement and medication error reduction. Although improvement was reported for all questions, items such as "awareness of the impact of medication errors on patient health" were easier to comprehend compared to items such as "ability to implement methods to reduce medication errors."…”

“…10 The first portion (items 1-9) of the retrospective pretest and posttest asked students to assess their perception (weak, fair, good, or very good) of their knowledge of quality improvement and medication error reduction knowledge before and after taking the EPIQ class, respectively. The second portion (items 10-16) of the retrospective pretest and posttest asked the students to report their level of agreement (disagree, somewhat disagree, somewhat agree, or agree) with statements about the importance of quality improvement and medication error reduction education before and after the EPIQ class, respectively.…”

“…Rasch analysis allows the evaluation of individual person measures and each item's contribution to the overall instrument. 10,11 When evaluating pretest to posttest measures, Rasch provides an advantage over other statistical methods because it quantifies changes in the attitudes and ability of each student and if present, identifies construct-shift bias. The Wolfe and Chiu procedure for item anchoring of pre-and postdata was used in this analysis, 13 which was conducted using Winsteps, version 3.7.2.…”

Pharmacy Student Knowledge and Communication of Medication Errors

“…3 The Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Strategic Plan also supports pharmacists' understanding of the science of safety to ensure their active participation in the development, implementation, and/or evaluation of new initiatives to improve the consumer's safe use of medical products. 4 Limited research has been conducted on what pharmacists and pharmacy students have learned about medication safety, [5][6][7][8][9] indicating considerable variation on the nature and depth of medication safety topics taught. Pharmacy programs providing medication safety instruction typically offer topics such as the nomenclature, frequency, cost, and morbidity/mortality associated with medication errors.…”

“…One innovative program augmented the classroom approach by teaching medication safety and error reduction topics through student projects at institutional and community pharmacy sites. 9 In this program, student knowledge and motivation to report and prevent errors was improved. It is not clear, however, what schools and colleges of pharmacy teach students about how they should communicate with patients and pharmacy staff members when medication errors occur, and how to prevent and/or intercept errors.…”