Quality Use of Medicines: Policy and Practice

Quality Use of Medicine
&
Strategies to Reduce the Risk of
Medication Errors
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note

QUM (Quality Use of Medicines)
– First developed in 2000, by the Australian Government under
National Medicines Policy (Chen & Nishtala, 2019).
– Primarily patient oriented, Quality Use of Medicine is a
movement that stresses upon better understanding of the
patient’s need of medicines with the help of better
implementation of patient-health care professional
communication (Sainsbury, 2019).
– For patients, Quality Use of Medicine refers to having proper
knowledge on the use of prescribed medicines and ensuring
safe and effective use of it.

Continued....
– The primary goal of the movement is to ensure judicious and safe use of
medicine by the public.
– According to Lindner (2016), documentation of Quality Use of Medicine
under the National Medicines Policy requires medicines to be used:
1. Judiciously
2. Appropriately
3. Safely
4. Efficaciously
– The following slides will focus on the improvement of medication safety
in health care settings.

Understanding the Risk
Medication Errors
– The most common treatment method by health care providers
is by the use of medications and this effectively increases the
incidence of medication errors during health care interventions.
– Adverse events that follow medication errors during
interventions are increased spending of resources, mortality and
morbidity issues (Tong et al., 2017).
– The risk of medication errors is highly avoidable.
– Common cause of medication errors include lack of patient’s
knowledge on the use of medications, poor and unsafe practices
by the health care providers and systems and improper
transition of care of the patient (Latimer et al., 2017).