World Patient Safety Day 2022: necessary medicines, safe medicines
The most common thing is that after visiting a doctor, a medication is prescribed, a chemical product that should not be taken lightly. Medicines are products to which special attention must be paid, and that is why the United Nations Organization has put the spotlight on them this September 17, World Patient Safety Day, a day established in 2019 by the 72nd World Health Assembly.
This year it launches a motto that Fraternidad-Muprespa fully subscribes to: “Medicines without harm” and that is included within the campaign of the 'WHO Global Challenge for Patient Safety', which has been disseminated since 2017.
According to the UN, unsafe practices in relation to the intake of medicines, as well as medication errors “are one of the main causes of injuries and avoidable damage in health systems around the world.”
That is why it is of vital importance that all stages of the life of a medicine, from its manufacture to its administration, through its storage, prescription or dispensing, are controlled effectively, reliably and sufficiently.
The four objectives for this day are to increase awareness about the harms related to unsafe practices, involve all actors who are part of the process to prevent errors, empower patients and families to actively participate in the safe use of medicines, and expand the application of the Global Patient Safety Challenge.
In the second point, that of the involvement of interested parties to prevent medication errors and reduce harm, is what Fraternidad-Muprespa focuses on this day, highlighting the effort and good work of the pharmacy department at the Fraternidad-Muprespa Havana Hospital.
This is how we do it in Fraternidad-Muprespa
In favor of patient safety, a process automation system was implemented in the Hospital, with multiple purposes: increasing efficiency, minimizing possible errors and keeping correct monitoring of what has been administered. Emilia Roldán, head of the hospital pharmacy, was the one who described in this news the pioneering system in Fraternidad-Muprespa and which was born with the new hospital.
Everything that surrounds the dispensing of medication, also seen from an economic perspective, is another aspect that benefits the patient. That is why Fraternidad-Muprespa has been signing agreements with various Pharmaceutical Associations, agreements by which prescriptions issued in official forms by doctors of the Mutual Fund are exempt from contributions for the affiliated workers and self-employed workers, as long as the medicines and health products prescribed are for the purpose of treatments derived from professional contingencies. This is the case of the agreement already signed with representatives of pharmacists from several territories, the last of them, that of Seville, as you can read in detail this news.
