The Value of Data and the Value of Questions: Achieving Improvement in Hospital Pharmacy and Medication Safety.

ABSTRACT

Medication safety incidents are one of the major patient safety issue faced across all healthcare services and one that is very challenging to tackle. To make progress, data about the supply and use of medicines that is generated and made available in clinical systems can serve both the purposes of patient safety and service quality improvement. This paper shows how the value of data for these purposes can be framed in terms of the value of questions. This theme is developed based on an interview with a quality and safety pharmacist working in a large hospital pharmacy unit.