Memorial Healthcare System: Patient-Friendly Daily Medication Schedule
Memorial Healthcare System, located in South Florida, is a six hospital not-for-profit organization with more than 1500 beds. Its mission is to provide safe, quality, cost-effective, patient- and family-centered care, regardless of one’s ability to pay, with the goal of improving the health of the community it serves.
Roughly 1.5 million preventable adverse drug events occur each year and hospitalized patients experience one preventable adverse drug event per day, according to the Institute of Medicine (To Err is Human 2000).
Communication between healthcare workers, patients and family members is a vital part of making health care safer. Memorial Healthcare system planned to boost patient safety by including patients as partners in their hospital care and educating them about their medications during their hospital stay.
Members of the quality and safety team for Memorial Healthcare System, which involves two nurses and a pharmacist, developed a patient-friendly daily medication schedule with help and input from staff and a Patient and Family Advisory Board. This schedule was piloted at one facility and then rolled out to all six of Memorial Healthcare System’s hospitals.
Memorial Healthcare recently presented their program at the annual conference of the National Patient Safety Foundation in Florida. Additionally, the patient safety program was featured on a South Florida news channel.
The report was created and generated from the system’s medication administration record. It is designed to print out on designated nursing station printers on a daily basis. The schedule is then given to the hospitalized patient each day and lists:
- the medications they are receiving while in the hospital (brand and generic name)
- the dose of medication
- route (how the medication is taken or administered)
- time and frequency (how often the medication is taken or administered)
Click here for an example patient medication schedule.
The implementation of the patient-friendly medication schedule has had far-reaching benefits, including helping patients and their families
catch and prevent potential medication errors and
empowering them with the knowledge they need to help make their stay safer while in the hospital. All of Memorial Healthcare System’s hospitalized patients now receive a copy of their medication schedule on a daily basis.
For further information or questions, please contact:
Jodi Fredericks
Pharmacy Safety & Medication Officer
Memorial Healthcare System
[email protected]
Reference:
Fredericks J., Bunting, R. Implementation of a Patient Friendly Medication Schedule to Improve Patient Safety Within a Healthcare System.
Journal of Healthcare Risk Management. May 2010. 29 (4): 22-27