Effect of Full-time Allocation of Pharmacists in Every Hospital Ward on Medical Safety

Abstract

In the 2012 revision of the Japanese medical payment system, a new payment fee was established for inpatient pharmaceutical services. These services are expected to reduce the burden of medical doctors and other staff and improve medical safety and the quality of pharmaceutical therapy. To charge the new fee, pharmacists should be assigned to all wards. Many hospitals aim to achieve this. To our knowledge, however, there are no reports on the effects of full-time allocation of pharmacists in every ward on medical safety.
Nagoya University Hospital has allocated full-time pharmacists to every ward since April 2011. In the present study, to evaluate its effect on medical safety, we analyzed incident reports related to medicine from April 2010 to March 2013. As to the number of incident reports, there was little difference among the 3 years, but a significant increase was observed in the percentage of incident reports that contained the word ‘pharmacists’ in 2011 and 2012. Detailed analysis revealed that the percentage of incident reports indicating that other staff consulted with a ‘pharmacist’ in 2011 and the percentage of incident reports indicating incidents found by ‘pharmacists’ in 2012 were both significantly higher than those in 2010.
These findings suggest that the full-time allocation of pharmacists in every hospital ward results in promotion of team-based healthcare services and medical safety.