p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.
0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify; font: 12.0px ‘Times New Roman’; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000}span.s1 {font-kerning: none}Medicines are used to diagnose, treat or prevent diseases but oftentimes even the safest drugs may cause adverse effects and unwanted interactions and may cause harm to the patient. “Any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while the medication is in the control of the health care professional, patient, or consumer, such events may be related to professional practice, health care products, procedures, and systems, including prescribing; order communication; product labelling, packaging, and nomenclature; compounding; dispensing; distribution; administration; education; monitoring; and use” (National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting and Prevention NCC MERP n.
d, para. 2). The medication safety standard seeks to ensure clinicians are competent to safely prescribe, dispense and administer appropriate medicines and to monitor medicine use and to make sure consumers are informed about medicines and understand their individual medicine needs and risks (ACSQHC, 2017). Prevention of medication incidents can be achieved by improving governance and quality measures, enhancing clinician-patient communication and partnership, refine clinician-workforce communication and clinical handover, utilise technology in supporting information recording and transfer, and allowing effective access to patient data and clinical decision support as well as standardising and systemising process of continuity of medication management. Other effective strategies in enhancing the safety and quality of medication established by The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care such as safer naming, labelling and packaging of medicines, medication reconciliation, medication safety alerts that gives instructions to prevent adverse drug reactions and medication safety links (Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, n.
d.). Overall improvement of the medication safety system leads to improved health outcomes for the consumers and a significant reduction in medicine related hospital admissions and healthcare cost.
