In September 2014, on behalf of the community pharmacy sector, Pharmacy Voice committed to NHS England’s Sign up to Safety campaign, and outlined what it was doing to support the role that community pharmacy can play in putting patient safety at the heart of the NHS.
NHS England’s vision is for the NHS to become the safest healthcare system in the world, delivering harm free care for every patient that uses the system. The Sign up to Safety campaign aims to ensure that all healthcare organisations structure their future plans around common goals defined by the campaign.
In its submission, Pharmacy Voice committed to:
- focus on medicines optimisation through its on-going work streams;
- continue to engage with public and stakeholder consultations, keeping patient safety at the forefront of all of its responses;
- feed into the Falsified Medicines Directive work to help prevent the entry of falsified medicines into the legal supply chain;
- continue to conduct annual practice-based audits which over 11,500 pharmacies can take part in; and,
- produce practical advice, and discussion / evidence papers to keep pharmacy staff informed and up to date on topics and developments that could impact on patient safety.
Although Pharmacy Voice has since disbanded, the community pharmacy Patient Safety Group is passionate about taking forward all of the commitments originally made in this submission. We will work with others, both inside and outside of the sector, to ensure that patient safety is at the heart of everything that community pharmacy teams do across the UK.
