Institute For Safe Medication Practices

Programs: Education:ismp considers education to be a core component of its mission, and offers a variety of valuable educational resources for healthcare practitioners and consumers, including frequent webinars, continuing education sessions at some of the nation's largest professional meetings, workshops, lectures, posters, videos, and patient brochures. A wide range of free tools for healthcare practitioners, such as lists of high-alert drugs and potentially dangerous abbreviations, are available on www. Ismp. Org. In addition, ismp hosts medication safety fellowships and onsite mentoring programs for medication safety officers and international healthcare practitioners. Ismp's consumer website, www. Consumermedsafety. Org, gives individuals the ability to receive customized safety alerts for the medications they, their family members, and their friends take, along with advice from leading safety experts and information and guidelines on safe medication use.

consultations:each year, ismp provides confidential consulting services to healthcare facilities across the country in a wide range of practice settings, including hospitals and community pharmacies, to help them improve medication safety. Onsite hospital and health system risk assessments by a multidisciplinary team of practitioners result in safe practice recommendations for medication error prevention and follow-up implementation and support services. On an annual basis, these onsite visits directly impact facilities representing more than 5,000 inpatient beds and hundreds of thousands of emergency department visits. In addition, ismp consultants provide similar assessment and support to outpatient pharmacies nationwide, representing tens of thousands of prescriptions filled each year. Unlike other consultants, ismp constantly updates its evidenced-based prevention strategies with real-time information gained from ongoing analysis of thousands of reports submitted to its national voluntary error reporting programs.

publications:ismp produces five electronic newsletters that collectively reach more than three million readers and are recognized as some of the most timely, comprehensive medical alert systems in the world. The biweekly ismp medication safety alert! Acute care edition provides virtually every u. S. Hospital with vital and life-saving information about medication and device errors and adverse drug reactions. The monthly community/ ambulatory care edition and nurse advise-err newsletters give pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, nurses, physicians, and other health professionals recommendations that they can use in their own practice settings. The bimonthly ismp medication safety alert! Long-term care advise-err provides timely medication safety information to staff working with resident populations that are often elderly, frail, dependent, complex in nature, and fraught with many different illnesses and dysfunctions. Safe medicine, also published every other month, is the only consumer health newsletter focusing specifically on error prevention. Ismp also publishes educational columns in several healthcare professional journals and publications and comprehensive books on safe medication use for healthcare practitioners.