Background
History of Safe Assured and SafetyNET-Rx
Safe Assured is an international research consortium conducting research and evidence-driven outreach for community pharmacies, pharmacists, patients, industry regulators, and health policy makers. Through its research and outreach, Safe Assured is helping to ensure the reliability of our community pharmacies throughout Canada and beyond.
The Safe Assured research team originally began as SafetyNET-Rx, which was formed to address pharmacy errors in community pharmacies – all pharmacies in a non-hospital setting – across Nova Scotia. With over 600 million prescriptions filled in Canada each year, errors – such as administering the wrong medication or the wrong dosage – are bound to happen; therefore, SafetyNet-Rx’s founders realized the importance of helping our healthcare system learn from these errors to reduce the likelihood of their reoccurrence.
The genesis of SafetyNET-Rx came in 2005 from a research study sponsored by the Nova Scotia College of Pharmacists on quality improvement in the province’s community pharmacies. The researchers included scholars from Dalhousie University and St. Francis Xavier University, as well as 70 community pharmacists. The primary funder was the Canadian Institute of Health Research, who financed the building and implementation of an error collection system. Other key funding for the SafetyNET-Rx program came from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation, and the Canadian Foundation for Pharmacy.
The founding objective of SafetyNET-Rx was to enhance patient safety through a community pharmacy-based quality management program. The program encouraged pharmacies to apply a set of standardized business processes, quality management practices, and integrated information technologies to identify, report, analyze, and learn from medication errors and near misses, referred to as quality-related events (QREs). The research program then partnered with the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) Canada, who provided the study participants with access to their online reporting system (CPhIR) for recording QREs, as well as their medication safety questionnaire (MSSA).
Based on the results of the pilot study, Nova Scotia in 2010 became the first province in Canada to require its community pharmacies to report prescription errors. The subsequent research on Nova Scotia’s experience with error reporting has created greater awareness of pharmacy errors and enabled pharmacists to use the resulting evidence as a learning opportunity throughout Nova Scotia. The impact of the SafetyNET-Rx initiative is now being felt across Canada as seven other provinces have followed suit in adapting – or working toward adapting – similar error reporting and safety learning requirements at the community pharmacy level.
SafetyNET-Rx produced award-winning research, which has resulted in the publication of numerous papers on community pharmacy in Nova Scotia since the initial implementation of the research program. A full list of the team’s publications can be found here.
Dalhousie’s Rowe School of Business in the Faculty of Management has since taken the lead on the project, renamed Safe Assured in 2018, and the focus has moved beyond just error reporting. The team has expanded to include new researchers from the University of Cincinnati, Manchester University, Queens University, Saint Mary’s University, and the University of Montreal, as well as several new industry partners, and is putting the Faculty’s vision – “inspiring transformational solutions for society” – into practice. The current team director and principal investigator of Safe Assured is Professor James R. Barker, who first joined the team in 2014 to evaluate SafetyNET-Rx and took the lead on this multi-pronged project in 2017.
Now, Safe Assured is a national and international leader in community pharmacy safety. The researcher team is working with pharmacists, regulators, and businesses to ensure the reliability and effectiveness of community pharmacies. Safe Assured has partnered with the international community pharmacy error reporting database provider and data aggregator, PharmaPod, who is able to facilitate access to data and collaboration with key stakeholders in patient safety and community pharmacy across the world. Safe Assured has also begun a new partnership with Shoppers Drug Mart and is actively working with their patient safety and continuous quality improvement officers. When the Province of Ontario implemented their own error reporting system in 2018 (named AIMS, for Assurance and Improvement in Medication Safety), Professor Barker was asked to join their incident analysis and advisory response team.
The team is currently engaged in improving the quality and functionality of the information on error reporting and safety enhancement systems for pharmacists, as well as using knowledge translation to put our research findings into practice to create more practical safety tools and standardized analytical methods. Safe Assured now develops the evidence-based strategies and systems that will help community pharmacists play a bigger role in creating a sustainable health care system.
Most recently, a team of Safe Assured researchers were awarded the Robert L. Wears Patient Safety Leadership Award from the QSEN Institute for Patient Safety in Jacksonville, Florida, including Dr. Jim Barker, Dr. Neil MacKinnon, Dr. Todd Boyle, and Bev Zwicker (of the Nova Scotia College of Pharmacists). The award recognizes those who have significantly impacted the field of patient safety through critical analysis, research, education, or knowledge dissemination.