A DRUG SAFETY RISK MANAGEMENT AND ASSESSMENT MECHANISM FOR COMMUNITY PHARMACY IN TAIWAN

ABSTRACT

Pharmacy is a specialized service industry, with unique inherent risks different from other industries. The biggest risk source of the pharmacy industry is “Medication Error”. As our community enters into an aging society and the policy of separation of prescribing and dispensing gradually matures, the importance of drug safety of the community pharmacy increases. This study applies the grounded theory to find the critical risk factors of medication error from the literature review, adopts the Delphi method to revise these factors and uses the analytic hierarchy processing methodology to analyze each element in our proposed drug safety risk management and assessment mechanism. This study contributes to the community pharmacy by developing the drugs safety assessment model to help the pharmacy to have a better understanding of the risk factors associated with its day-to-day business operations and to provide references to pharmacists in setting up more complete risk management strategies in the future.

Keywords:

• medication error
• community pharmacy
• grounded theory