Effectively embedding medication safety into PSIRF

Anna Bischler
Welcome to our podcast. I’m Anna Bischler, I’m a pharmacist within the Medicines Use and Safety Team at NHS Specialist Pharmacy Service. I’m here with my colleague Emma Kirk, who works within our team as the National Lead for the Medication Safety Officer [MSO] Network, but is also a frontline MSO working within an acute organisation. We are here to talk through our next webinar event called Embedding Medication Safety in the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework, that’s PSIRF, and we just want to give you an idea of what you can expect.

This event is part of our Medication Safety Across the System series. In these events, we focus on medication safety issues which cannot be effectively addressed without true collaborative working, both within a range of different healthcare professionals and also across systems. They are aimed at any healthcare professional working in the NHS who has a desire to improve the safer use of medicines or who are working in a role where medication safety or patient safety is a priority. So, if that describes you, then this event could be for you.

PSIRF, when first introduced, was a major shift in the way that the NHS responded to patient safety incidents and has demanded new ways of working. We know that some individuals and organisations are further along than others in developing these new systems; so, adjusting organisational structures, responses, and culture to ensure the full realisation of PSIRF.

Our webinar has been put together to meet the needs of any healthcare professional who is at any stage along this journey. We hope to inspire those at the beginning, and for those who are further along, we have some examples of good practice to share, which we hope will prompt your reflection on local practice, which then prompts a consideration of whether you could translate that learning into local practice.

Emma, as a frontline medication safety officer who’s been involved in the design and development of your organisational PSIRF plan, can you please talk through your personal experience and how that, alongside intelligence from NHSE, has inspired us to put together this event?

Emma Kirk
Thanks, Anna.

So, the main focus of an MSO has always been to promote medication incident reporting, to investigate them, to ensure there’s organisational learning. The focus of PSIRF to move from investigating the minutiae of every incident to focus on wider systems issues and quality improvement, was therefore a change in mindset for the MSOs. Some organisations found that quite a challenge. We did recognise, though, that PSIRF gave us an opportunity to embrace the wider MSO role as medication safety leaders to drive improvement work rather than just an investigator of incidents.

So, I think as an MSO, I’ve been on a real journey. To start off with, it was a struggle to get a seat at the table and to champion medication safety issues to be included in my organisation’s plan. Then, once I had a seat, I was asked for just one issue, and how could I just choose one drug or one issue? The focus they seemed to be focusing on was whether we’d caused harm rather than where we knew we could make meaningful improvements. And I know that other MSOs were having similar struggles and had been reaching out for support.

There are numerous resources on the PSIRF tools out there, but nothing to support the medication safety community in ways to ensure that medication safety was a priority for an organisation to include in their plan. So, really, we wanted to give the MSOs and other medication safety activists the confidence to champion medication safety issues via their PSIRF plan.

Anna Bischler
Thanks, Emma. So, to sum up, ultimately, we want individuals attending this event to have the confidence to use the framework as an effective tool to champion medication safety improvements.

We’ve got a few fantastic speakers lined up to share their experiences and share top tips and ideas for good practice. So, we’ve mentioned before that we were lucky enough to have insights into the national uptake of PSIRF from Lauren, who is the head of PSIRF implementation at NHSE. She’s going to kick off the webinar, setting the scene for how PSIRF is used in the NHS and focusing on how it can be used to effectively deliver safety improvements.

Emma, what else can we expect to hear on the webinar?

Emma Kirk
So, MSO listeners may recall that we asked them to complete a survey about some of the challenges and barriers that they’d been facing regarding the implementation of PSIRF. So, I’ll be sharing the feedback from the MSO network. We’ll then focus on exemplar practice, which will hopefully help the audience to overcome some of the challenges and barriers that they reported in the survey.

We’ll be joined by Liam, Assistant Director of Quality Improvement and Patient Care at NHS Hertfordshire and West Essex ICB. He has experience of working in both primary and secondary care as a leader in patient safety, and Liam will cover how organisations can decide what to put in their PSIRF plan and how to look through the lens of systems learning, and we’ll explore accepted tolerance for patient harm. He’ll also share top tips for effective collaboration.

We’ll also be joined by Bianca, a consultant pharmacist presenting with patient safety lead Odette. They both work at King’s College Hospital in London and perhaps are further along than some organisations in their PSIRF journey, and so they’ll be sharing their experience and top tips too.

Most importantly, an essential element from our Medication Safety Across the System webinars, we will hear from Mark Smith, who will share with us why having the patient and carer perspective is so critical to the effective PSIRF implementation.

Anna Bischler
Thanks, Emma. That’s a bumper amount of useful insights that will be shared on the webinar.

Emma, you mentioned earlier about challenges with understanding how to use PSIRF tools. On our webinar, will there be any training on how to use these tools?

Emma Kirk
No, that’s not going to be something that we’re going to cover. There are already numerous resources out there which healthcare professionals can access to upskill themselves in using the tools. So, this webinar will very much focus on how we can effectively embed medication safety into the PSIRF plans.

Anna Bischler
Thanks. So, we hope our chat has given you a flavour of what to expect from our event. We plan for even more resources, short videos, that will support this webinar and they will be available on our website. During the live webinar, there is always a really active and engaging chat which goes on alongside our presenters, so, attending the live webinar will give you an opportunity to network with your peers and pose questions. So, if this event sounds suitable for you, please do register from the link on our SPS website.

So, from Emma and I, thank you very much.