This year's Patient Safety Week (PSW) was held form 5-11 November 2017 with health services participating nationally. The focus was on medication safety which is in line with the World Health Organization’s five-year medication safety challenge. Harm is still occurring because people are taking the wrong medicines, so the Health Quality & Safety Commission (HQSC) produced a campaign with resources to encourage conversations between consumers and health professionals.
Our efforts for Patient Safety Week were recognised by HQSC and we were awarded with a morning tea shout.
Patient Safety Video
During PSW we released a 'world-first' Patient Safety Video featuring an alien and a few familiar faces.
Medication Safety Information & Resources
We developed the following resources:
- Medication Safety tray mat (also available in public areas as a take-home resource)
- Medication Safety screensaver running on all Waitemata DHB PCs
- Using Medicines Safely cards – available in English, Chinese and Korean, and also being translated by our Māori and Pacifica teams
- We had stands with take away information for the public at North Shore and Waitakere Hospitals
- We used our 'Happy or Not' terminals for the month of November to better understand our patients' perspectives by asking "How comfortable do you feel asking staff questions about your medicines?"
Medication Safety Tray Mat and our 'Happy or Not' terminals
Presentations
- We presented at Grand Rounds two weeks before PSW, covering:
- Informed choice and the importance of communication on medications and their side effects (patient story and experience)
- Integration (case study from clinical leader)
- Reconciliation (case study from anaesthetist)
- International speaker Carolyn Canfield came to speak about a patient's perspective:
- experience of harm
- changine paradigm
- staff resilience + patients
- We presented to a Waitemata DHB consumer group about Medication Safety