A timely, innovative and cross-disciplinary project that has the potential to place Nova Scotia at the forefront of medication safety in Canada has received a total of $240,000 in funding from the latest Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation (NSHRF) grant competitions.
The funding, for a project called SafetyNET-Rx, will enable 70 community pharmacies in Nova Scotia to implement a continuous quality improvement program, according to faculty at St. Francis Xavier University’s Schwartz School of Business and Information Systems, Dr. Todd Boyle and Dr. Tom Mahaffey. They are part of a multi-disciplinary research team that includes Dr. Neil MacKinnon, Dalhousie University College of Pharmacy, Dr. Lars Hallstrom, University of Alberta, Certina Ho, Institute for Safe Medication Practices Canada, and the Nova Scotia College of Pharmacists (NSCP) including its deputy registrar, Bev Zwicker.
The team has received a $114,000 SSHRC public outreach grant to expand the pilot program began last year in over a dozen community pharmacies, and a $126,000 NSHRF grant to track the project’s progress and performance over the next three years.
“SafetyNET-Rx offers many benefits,” says Dr. Boyle, Canada Research Chair in Integrated IT in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises and principal investigator of the two grants, “It builds upon a successful pilot, offers benefits to the province and public, has the support of several industry partners, and addresses a significant issue; the reporting of errors and near misses and learning from them.” The granting agencies also realize the benefits of SafetyNET-Rx to the safety of the Canadian healthcare system, with the SSHRC grant ranking sixth in the country and the NSHRF grant scoring 4.43 out of a possible 4.6.
The key objective of the project is to increase the reporting of medication incidents so that pharmacies and their staff can learn from these incidents in order to reduce their reoccurrence in the future. When medication errors and “near misses,” collectively known as quality related events (QREs), in retail pharmacy go unreported, opportunities to improve the Canadian healthcare system are lost.
SafetyNET-Rx is a continuous quality improvement program (CQI) that applies standardized business processes, integrated information systems, and commonly used CQI practices to reduce, report, and learn from QREs. “The purpose of SafetyNet-Rx is to increase the dialogue between pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, physicians and regulators by providing training, tools and support to make it more likely that we will identify the QRE, report it and the final step, learn from it,” says Dr. Mahaffey, a business professor who also serves as president of Council for the NSCP. Phase I began in June 2008 with 13 participating community pharmacies. Staff from these stores underwent training and worked to customize an IT-enabled reporting system. Findings from the pilot stores indicate that pharmacies are identifying and reporting more errors and this is providing a process to continuously learn from that.
The project has also grown in terms of personnel involved. A master’s student, a PhD candidate, and an undergraduate pharmacy student from Dalhousie have joined the team as have several undergraduate business and IS students from StFX.