Medication Masterclass – Managing Medication Errors | Webinar

1. Analyse how your organisation currently responds to medication errors and identify opportunities to improve practice.
2. Understand why human error is inevitable and why safe medication systems cannot rely on people simply being more careful.
3. Recognise the causes of common medication errors and use practical human-factors techniques (used in other safety critical industries) to reduce risk.
4. Move beyond blame and investigate medication errors using a systems-first approach, identifying why the error occurred rather than simply who made it.
5. Carry out a structured medication error investigation, identifying contributory factors, root causes and meaningful actions to prevent recurrence.
6. Decide when retraining or competency reassessment is genuinely appropriate following a medication error.
7. Understand what good medication incident reporting looks like for safeguarding and care regulators including CQC, Care Inspectorate Wales and the Care Inspectorate in Scotland.

Part TWO – Being Fair: Accountability After Medication Errors

1. Know when a medication error should remain a systems-learning issue and when individual accountability needs to be considered.
2. Distinguish genuine human error from deliberate or potentially unsafe behaviour.
3. Assess fairly whether health, circumstances or other factors contributed to a medication incident.
4. Evaluate whether a member of staff could reasonably have foreseen the risk created by their actions.
5. Consider how another reasonable and similarly trained member of staff might have acted in the same circumstances.
6. Take mitigating circumstances into account before reaching conclusions about individual responsibility.
7. Choose a fair and proportionate response that balances learning, support, supervision, safeguarding and accountability.