ASMSO Newsletter

Spring 2011

Message from the ASMSO President, Christian Hartman, PharmD, MBA

Greetings,
During a recent ASMSO Board of Directors meeting, we discussed the need to align the 2011 strategic goals with the advancement of the profession and improve the society. The board has established achievable goals that I believe will address opportunities in the practice of medication safety and greatly improve the value in being an ASMSO member.

Building upon the great work being done by our membership committee, we will be will be distributing the Lilly Medication Safety Booklet to all members with a current address on file. This book is a nice introduction to medication safety with valuable references and resources to improve your practice. In addition, we plan to develop an online medication safety education portal for members, complete a membership needs assessment survey, implement the Fellow of American Society of Medication Safety Officers (FSMSO) Recognition Program, and develop a position statement for the measurement of medication use safety.

Achieving these goals is crucial to better our society and further the practice of medication safety. I invite the membership to join a committee. If you are interested in volunteering on a committee, feel free to send me an email (christian.hartman@gmail.com).

Best Wishes,
Christian Hartman, PharmD, MBA

Member Spotlight - Robert Feroli, PharmD, FASHP

“We live in a complex and ever changing environment with a continuous potential for failure. Our patients need all of us need to be safety champions.”

ASMSO would like to introduce Bob Feroli Bob who derives his energy and passion for safety form the multidisciplinary team with whom he has the privilege to work.

For the past ten years, Bob has been the Medication Safety Officer at Johns Hopkins Hospital (JHH) in Baltimore, MD and leads the JHH ASHP-accredited Medication Use Safety residency established in 2005.

Bob’s career at JHH began as a drug information pharmacist 31 years ago, where he developed a passion for promoting rational and safe use of medications. In 1984, he established an investigational drug service (IDS) which is now an integral part of clinical research at Hopkins.

Bob’s love of teaching began in the mid 1980’s and he currently teaches a course on rational therapeutics at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and lectures on safe prescribing practices at the Johns Hopkins Medical School. In 2005, Bob help co-develop a course on Medication-Use Safety at the University Of Maryland School Of Pharmacy and is frequently invited to give safety related lectures in many venues to all members of the health care team.

Bob has been very active with several local and national pharmacy organizations. He is the past president and current member the Maryland Society of Health System Pharmacists (MSHP) and was selected to become a Fellow of ASHP in 2005. Bob currently serves on the ASHP Foundation selection panel charged with choosing an annual winner for the “Award for Excellence in Medication-Use Safety.”

Bob visits international hospitals affiliated with Johns Hopkins to provide consultation focusing on the Medication-Use system to improve safety, efficiency, therapeutic appropriateness and compliance with Joint Commission International (JCI) standards.

Member Article: Standardized Work.
By Ken Maxik
Standardized Work is an agreed upon set of work procedures that establishes the best method and sequence for each process. It keeps the variables of the process constant, so the outcome will be predictable.

This article will describe how Standardized Work can affect patient safety through observation of the medication administration process. Through this observation, it can be determined if the process is capable of producing the desired results or if your system is an impediment to obtaining the organization’s goals.

For this article, the process observed was of a single medication pass to a single patient on a medical nursing unit of a community acute care hospital during the morning medication administration time.

A Standard Work Sheet was used during the observation (Figure 1) which allowed for tabulation of the time taken for walking, waiting, and manual versus automated work. In addition, the amount of time is represented as a value added versus non – value added activity.

In this community acute care hospital, a nurse’s workload requires that medications are administered for each patient within a 12 minute timeframe. In the observed process, 14 steps were completed in 14 minutes beginning with retrieval of the medication from an automated distribution cabinet, and concluding with the administration of the medication in the Medication Administration Record.

The observed staff member was interrupted 5 times during the observation period (about once every three minutes); Based upon the number of interruptions, and the adjustments the nursing staff member made during the medication pass, it was noted that a systematic medication administration process was not in place on this unit.

Discussion
This single observation notes that the current workflow of a 12-minute medication administration process does not allow for all the required steps to be completed ensuring proper medication administration and the lack of standardization in the process allows for variances in performance that can lead to errors.

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