SUBSCRIBE
to the
PSQH e-Newsletter

Huntingdon Valley, PA, November 7, 2007 — The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) is proud to announce its 10th Annual Cheers Awards winners and Lifetime Achievement Award recipient. The annual awards dinner and reception will be held on Tuesday evening, December 4, 2007, at the Mirage hotel during the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) Midyear Clinical Meeting in Las Vegas. This year is the 10th anniversary of the Cheers Awards, which honor individuals, organizations, and companies that have set a superlative standard of excellence for others to follow in the prevention of medication errors and adverse drug events. The winners of the 2007 awards are:

Brigham & Women's Hospital
Boston, MA
Brigham & Women's Hospital is being honored for creating a best practices process for interdisciplinary smart pump infusion implementation. Their process could serve as a model for other organizations and illustrates the importance of redesigning systems that can lead to errors, mapping clinical workflow, including front-line users in smart pump library design, and ensuring that adequate resources are appropriated when high-end technology solutions are introduced to clinical practice. Lessons learned from this project will be shared in a chapter of The Nurse's Role in Medication Safety, which will be published by Joint Commission Resources.

Mercy Health Center
Oklahoma City, OK
Mercy Health Center's unique Pharmacy Fall Prevention Program addresses a crucial safety issue by using a screening tool determine medication-related fall risk. Nursing and pharmacy staff work together to generate a medication-specific fall risk score, which if high triggers pharmacist review of the patient's medication profile and generation of intervention recommendations, including altering doses, instituting laboratory surveillance, and providing additional patient education. The program has effected a 36% reduction in falls resulting in injuries over 2.5 years. Results have been shared with the healthcare community during poster sessions during ASHP meetings.

John F. Mitchell, PharmD, FASHP
Medication Safety Coordinator
University of Michigan Health System
Ann Arbor, MI
For the past 25 years, Dr. Mitchell's list of medications that should not be crushed has been used to improve medication safety worldwide. Before his compilation, there was no readily available reference that identified medications whose efficacy was affected by crushing and few manufacturers included this information in their package inserts. The list is regularly updated, and is used by providers in acute care, outpatient, and community settings. It is published in numerous resources and reference guides, and is available free of charge to healthcare providers and consumers through ISMP's website.

Tim Vanderveen, PharmD, MS
Vice President, Center for Safety and Clinical Excellence
Cardinal Health
San Diego, CA
Vanderveen will receive the ISMP Volunteer Award for his long-standing commitment to process improvements in medication safety, including creation of smart pump technology. He has helped ISMP draw attention to the error-prone way IV drugs are prescribed using multiple units rather than in a standard fashion, and the frequent failure of clinical staff to cap IV tubing and disinfect IV ports. Vanderveen also has worked with ISMP since the early 1990s on advancing recognition of free-flow as a major drug-related problem. He frequently serves as a medication safety advocate, and has interacted with other companies at the Institute's request to describe safety issues and solutions.

Walworth County Patient Safety Council-Aurora Health Care
Elm Grove, WI
The Walworth County Patient Safety Council has established a demonstration project that significantly improved medication safety for local seniors. Healthcare professionals and consumers joined together to implement the Partners in Safety campaign, which distributed medication bags and lists and offered presentations on improving communication about medication management for patients being served in five Aurora health care clinics and the community at large. The Council also recruited outside groups, Consumers for Advancing Patient Safety and Midwest Airlines, to help spread its messages. Senior medication list accuracy has improved from 69% to 81%, and results have been shared in professional forums and with consumer groups.

The ISMP Lifetime Achievement Award is being presented to Richard J. Croteau, MD, patient safety advisor to Joint Commission International focusing on international patient safety activities in collaboration with the WHO's World Alliance for Patient Safety. The award honors individuals who have made ongoing contributions to medication safety. Dr. Croteau is a well-known expert in both safety and healthcare process improvement--in his more than 17 years with The Joint Commission, he has been responsible for advancement of patient safety standards, creation and maintenance of the sentinel event database, development of national patient safety goals, and implementation of numerous other patient safety initiatives.

The ISMP Medication Safety Alert! Subscriber Award is being presented to the Duke University Hospital in Durham, NC in recognition of its sustained, long-term initiative to integrate recommendations from the ISMP Medication Safety Alert!® newsletter into the work of internal patient safety committees.

Source: ISMP