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Medication forum lets peers evaluate each other, themselves

Nurse Leader Weekly, August 28, 2003

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Imagine this: health care professionals, some of whom are rivals, visit one another's facilities to solve medication management problems. That's what VHA New England members are now doing.

The VHA New England, the Northeastern chapter of a nationwide network of 2,200 community-owned health care organizations and affiliated physicians, calls the effort its on-site shared learning program. The VHA is based in Irving, TX. The shared learning program is a component of the organization's medication error prevention initiative (MEPI), a team effort to decrease medication errors in member hospitals in the Northeast.

The 22 MEPI members from health care facilities in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts sit on a task force that meets monthly to discuss medication errors.

The endeavor also helps participants comply with the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations' (JCAHO) medication standards, the VHA says. The draft medication standard MM.8.10 requires organizations to evaluate their medication processes on a regular basis.

Instituting a program similar to the on-site shared learning program can help you comply with the new medication standards, the VHA says.

Any MEPI member can request help from the group with a medication problem in his or her facility. Once a request is made, a team of MEPI volunteers is assembled by the MEPI leadership, and is sent to that organization to provide a collegial review.

During the on-site visit, the following events take place:

• Three or four task force members from different disciplines spend half a day at the facility
• The reviewers first meet with some of the organization's administrators, nursing staff, and its representative to MEPI to explain why they're there, what they're going to examine, and what kind of cooperation they will need
• In the various departments, task force members interview staff, observe procedures, and take notes
• At the end of their visit, the reviewers meet for 30 minutes to write up a report
• They then meet again with the same group of hospital representatives to explain their findings and make recommendations for changes

"The goal is to identify weaknesses and to pinpoint what that organization could do to [improve] the safety of its processes. In addition, what [the reviewers] are hoping to collect are examples of some good things that they're doing as well," says Arnold E. Mattis, RN, MSN, EdD, senior director of clinical and consulting services for VHA New England.

Adapted from Hospital Pharmacy Regulation Report: href="http://www.hcmarketplace.com/Prod.cfm?id=1505&S=ENMW

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