Pharmacist and patient safety: Focus on drug safety

Patient safety is defined as “the absence of preventable harm to a patient and reduction of risk of unnecessary harm associated with health care to an acceptable minimum." Medication errors are one of the common sources of patient harm and cause prolonged illness, permanent disability and death. Medication-related harm affects 1 out of every 30 patients in health care, with more than a quarter of this harm regarded as severe or life threatening. Half of the avoidable harm in health care is related to medications (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/patient-safety). Pharmacists play a key role in the drug use and reduce the occurrence of avoidable harm due to medication errors by drug supply and maintenance, medication review, drug dispensing, patient education and counselling, pharmacy clinics, etc.

Pharmacists are key healthcare professionals and responsible for ensuring safe, effective, appropriate use of medications, therefore they play an important role in patient safety via pharmacy services. Pharmacists are well-positioned to advocate for both safer medication management systems and a culture of patient safety in health care organisations (https://www.fip.org/file/4788). However, pharmacists’ role in patient safety and drug safety should be explored further under new world health care situation. Herein, this research topic provides an approach to reporting patient safety concerns, sharing medication management advances and learning from medication errors. Pharmacists, specialising in medication management, should consistently lower risks, reduce the occurrence of avoidable harm, make error less likely and weaken impact of harm when medication errors do occur.

Focus on drug safety, we welcome authors to submit case reports, original research and review articles contributing to better understanding of pharmacy services and patient safety. Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• adverse drug reaction and pharmacovigilance
• artificial intelligence (AI) for patient safety
• drug dispensing at pharmacy settings including PIVAS, outpatient & inpatient pharmacy, social pharmacy, etc.
• pharmacist-led medication review, clinics, patient education and counselling
• pharmacist-led popular science for drug safety
• policy study for drug safety

Please note:
Frontiers in Pharmacology strictly adheres to scientific rigor in data analysis and has recently decided not to accept manuscripts based solely on isolated data mining analyses from public pharmacovigilance databases, such as the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) or VigiAccess (see the journal policy here). These submissions may lead to misleading conclusions and unnecessary safety concerns or misinformed clinical decisions due to inherent limitations of such databases and disproportionality analysis approaches (see Hammad et al., Frontiers Perspective; Nature discussion).

Keywords: pharmacist, patient safety, drug, medication, pharmacovigilance

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.