Share your experiences in our national medicine safety scoping exercise

The NHSE national patient safety collaborative has identified two areas they want to work on to improve patient safety and reducing medicine related harm:

1. Psychotropic prescribing in learning disability and/or autism patients
2. Medication safety and optimisation to reduce falls and / or fractures in frail patients

The local Health Innovation Networks are working together on a year-long national scoping exercise to discover and develop innovations being used locally that could be scaled up nationally.

We are inviting people with experience of introducing innovation in these specialist areas to contact us to tell us about their experiences.

We want to hear from you if you have any examples of practice that has aimed to improve medicines safety and / or optimisation in these fields.

1. Psychotropic prescribing in learning disability and/or autism patients

We are interested in all psychotropic prescribing which includes the following medicine groups:

• Antipsychotics
• Antidepressants
• Anxiolytics and hypnotics
• Lithium
• Anti-convulsant medication when used for non-epileptic indications (including valproic acid and carbamazepine)
• Stimulants e.g. methylphenidate
• Or alternatives to any of these medicines

2. Medication safety and optimisation to reduce falls and / or fractures in frail patients

We are broadly looking at the following areas:

• Stopping medicines that cause falls
• Stopping medicines that reduce bone strength
• Starting medicines that increase bone strength
• Alternatives to medicines in any of the above

For both, we are interested in any Quality Improvement work you have undertaken whether big or small, in planning stage or fully implemented, whether it has been successful or stopped due to experiencing challenges. We will collect your experience via an informal on-line interview.

The aim of this scoping, led by the Health Innovation Networks, is to draw out real examples of what has worked well and what has not worked so well with the intention of creating a future national medicines safety improvement programme.

If you think you might have something to share with us please contact caroline.maries-tillott@healthinnovationwm.org who will arrange a convenient time.

Please also share this request with other contacts who may be interested in getting involved.