The Medication Error Conference focused on reducing medication errors and improving patient care with a focus on a zero tolerance approach.

“Progress has been made over the last decade to detect, report and learn from patient safety incidents, but further improvements are needed to increase the number of incident reports, improve data quality and maximise what is learned from medication errors….Medication errors are any patient safety incidents where there has been an error in the process of prescribing, preparing, dispensing, administering, monitoring or providing advice on medicines. These Patient Safety Incidents can be divided into two categories; errors of commission or errors of omission. The former include, for example, wrong medicine or wrong dose. The latter include, for example, omitted dose or a failure to monitor, such as international normalised ratio for anticoagulant therpy.”

Patient Safety Alert, MHRA and NHS England March 2014

Zero Tolerance to Medication Errors, great talk by Dr Janine Wright @NorthMidNHS at #MedicationErrors #london

— Leonora O’Brien (@Leonoraobrien) January 27, 2015

Delegates discussed national developments in reducing medication errors from NHS England, including the effective implementation of the National Patient Safety Alert on improving medication error incident reporting and learning released in 2014, and the developing role of the Medication Safety Officer. A key focus area of the conference was on developing a zero tolerance approach to medication errors – a strategy that has worked effectively for reducing infection rates, and pressure ulcer rates across the NHS.