Collaborative and co-Ordinated action for Medication Safety (COMS): improving General Practice and Community Pharmacy collaboration

Staff working within general practice surgeries and within community pharmacies often spot and resolve mistakes with medicines, such as delays with receiving a medicine that a patient needs or receiving the incorrect medicine. Information about these mistakes is not usually shared between general practice and community pharmacy staff and communication usually only happens when a mistake is extremely serious, missing opportunities for staff to learn and to take steps to prevent mistakes happening again.

Communication between general practice and community pharmacy is infrequent, however, good communication and joined up working can improve safety. A research study currently underway aims to understand more about the communication of safety issues between general practice surgeries and community pharmacies.

Once we have this knowledge, we want to develop ideas for how communication between general practice and community pharmacy staff can be improved so that they can better share information about medicines safety. It is more effective when solutions to problems are developed based on the experiences of those directly affected by the problems.

This project seeks to involve staff who work in general practices and community pharmacies along with patients to help design solutions that we can then test in real life settings in the future. We will involve healthcare staff, including general practitioners, community pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, general practice pharmacists and receptionists and patients, in two online workshops to create and discuss ideas about how to improve medication safety communication between community pharmacy and general practice. We will then develop a study to test these ideas to see if they have the potential to improve communication and the safe use of medicines.  

Amount awarded: £20,000