Getting the most from medicines for both patients and the NHS is becoming increasingly important as more people are taking more medicines. Medicines prevent, treat or manage many illnesses or conditions and are the most common intervention in healthcare. The safe use of medicines is the responsibility of all professionals, healthcare organisations and patients. Safety covers all aspects of medicines usage, including unwanted effects, interactions, safe processes and systems, and effective communication between professionals.
The Safer Medicines programme aims to identify innovative ways to improve medicines optimisation in collaboration with patients and professionals from across the health and care system. Successful projects will be scaled up across Salford, allowing residents to access an improved standard of medicines care.
Medicine Safety Activity
The Medicine Safety Activity in Salford report highlights initiatives which require further investigation and development to spread successful medicines safety improvements and standardise safe provision across Salford. Information gathered has been summarised under nine headings:
- Practices Improving the Safety of Medicines in Salford (PrISMS)
- SMASH
- Medicines Safety CQUIN
- Insulin – phase gate review
- Medicines quality strategies
- Neighbourhood Integrated Practice Pharmacists (NIPPS)
- Audit of shared care protocols in mental health
- Salford Standard
- Safer Clinical Systems: Safety Case
Watch the video below to find out more about our Safer Medicines work
Leading Integrated Teams Programme
In 2019, a number of the Medicines Optimisation Team from across the Salford system began the Leading Integrated Teams programme, offered by Aqua in collaboration with Aspire, PACE and Affina OD.
The project aims to build a network of professionals that supports medicine optimisation across a number of organisations in the Salford System to:
- Focus on the needs of the individual and the collective too enable them to lead even more effectively across complex systems
- Maximises the diverse skills, experience and talents (teams and individuals) so that they enable peers/teams to deliver and respond to day to day challenges
- Building a set of performance measures that provides the necessary insight to demonstrate ‘we’re on the right track’ or ‘we need to change course’ e.g. clarify objectives and outcomes to be achieved as part of the programme
- Building team resilience – creating a culture of high support and high challenge
- Creating a team leadership approach – moves away from ‘fixing it’ to one that encourages others to identify the problem and the solution