Note: This action is only applicable if your healthcare service prescribes, stores, supplies and/or administers medicines.
High-risk medicines have an increased risk of causing significant patient harm or death if they are misused or used in error. Errors with these medicines are not necessarily more common than with other medicines. Because they have a low margin of safety, the consequences of errors with high-risk medicines can be more devastating.
Healthcare services should implement high-risk medicine-related policies, procedures, guidelines and safe work practices about identifying, storing, prescribing, dispensing, administering and monitoring high-risk medicines.
The healthcare service should incorporate factors that contribute to safer use of high-risk medicines, or that reduce the opportunity for misuse or error, when considering:
- Storage of, access to, and disposal of high-risk medicines that comply with legislative requirements
- Safe prescribing (for example, active ingredient prescribing, prescribing restricted substances, electronic prescribing, dose-calculation tools)
- Safe selection, labelling and storage of all medicines (for example, look-alike, sound-alike [LASA] medicines)
- Design and layout of storage rooms or cupboards, and labelling requirements in these areas
- Alerts and safety checks in healthcare service’s clinical software.
Consider how the use of high-risk medicines will be managed for specific population groups. The healthcare service should investigate incidents involving high-risk medicines, analyse the frequency and causal factors, and implement strategies to mitigate risks associated with high-risk medicine-related incidents.
Links to Actions 1.04 Risk management and 1.05 Incident management and open disclosure
