Hi all,

We have been expanding our services to an increasing number of satellite sites across our state. With this, the ability to oversee the medication use process has become increasingly complex and challenging. We are therefore exploring how to expand our medication safety team. I was wondering if you would mind sharing your medication safety governance structure, including reporting structure (pharmacy versus patient safety department), and whether you oversee other medication safety employees, and what types of committees you use to help prioritize safety initiatives.

Recently, a "hot topic" from the Joint Commission ( PC.02.02.03 EP6) regarding the preparation of food/nutrient products in NICU. It was reported that Nurseries/NICU have been cited for preparing/adding fortification to formula/breast milk at the bedside. Does anyone have any information regarding hospitals being cited and why? Thanks in advance for your information.

Hello!

We are looking evaluate the role of a corporate policy on automatic stop orders. There is a trend to for health-systems to extend their automatic stop order (ASO) policy for routine/maintenance medications beyond 30 days. Some have even eliminated ASOs altogether.

What is the ASO policy at your institution? Is this a pharmacy or site policy or a corporate policy?

Hi all,

Is anyone documenting alpha gal allergies in EMR? Are there any medications/vaccines that fire alerts against this allergy?
Thank you!

Good morning,

Could you please share your experiences, including methodologies and tools, that you have implemented in your site to monitor clinical decision alerts within your CPOE.
We are willing to share our practices and results as we collect more data and information regarding this matter. We are planning to share all the relevant information we collected at 2018 ASHP midyear. Our main goal is to reduce alert fatigue for the providers and improve patient safety.

Thank you very much

There is a lot of safety literature about using insulin syringes only in patient care areas. Is this true also in the IV lab? We are currently NOT using insulin syringes because the labels state the volume to be drawn up. We are not doing patient specific doses in our lab but making TPNs, insulin infusions, etc. I would be interested to hear about your experience and reasons why you are doing what you are doing.

USP 800 includes medical surveillance for healthcare workers who handle hazardous drugs as a regular part of their job assignment.
1. How are institutions defining "regular" for this? Staff that handles chemo/HD how frequently?
2. What personnel/departments will you be including in this medical surveillance program? EVS?

I received a question from supply chain whether communication needs to go out to patients who received Apotex fluticasone given the voluntary recall. This is mostly coming from our retail rx, but I am curious whether anyone has criteria for sending communication out to patients. Thanks!

I'm working on removing range orders from my facility and am wondering if others have accomplished this? If so did you break orders up into two lines(morphine 2-4 mg q4hrs prn severe pain into morphine 2mg q4hrs prn moderate pain and morphine 4 mg q4hrs prn severe pain), go to 1st line pain med, 2nd line pain med, etc., strictly use mild, moderate, and severe with only one option or do something else? Thanks for your feedback.

Sincerely,
Jeff Ferber