Elizabeth Adams, EFN President, participated as keynote speaker of the ‘Resolution on good reconstitution practices: a major contribution to the safety of patients’ webinar organised by the Council of Europe. This webinar aimed to examine the Reconstitution Process in order to promote its implementation in National legislation and in hospital settings.
In a general framework in which usage of risk medication provokes regularly incidents and calamities and reconstitution is not harmonized, cooperation at European level and sharing of good practices among the EU Member States are essential steps for implementing the Reconstitution Process. Collaborative work can help to identify not only the patient harm caused by medication-related errors, but also the financial implications which these entail. Moreover, the Reconstitution Process has lots of benefits both for patients and healthcare professionals. On one hand, this process can ensure patients’ safety and high quality care; and on the other hand, it provides the framework for better collaboration and partnerships and it allows to acquire more knowledge and competences.
In this context, as stated by the EFN President, Elizabeth Adams, “nurses are a huge resource to guarantee that the process go forward.” As the largest group of health professionals in the majority of the countries, nurses’ capacities and knowledge can really help to transform the healthcare system and make pharmaceutical care a professional and political priority. Frontline nurses know what patients need and what the healthcare ecosystem needs. Hearing frontline nurses’ perspective is the best way to go into the right direction, so the Resolution gets implemented!
It is clear from the webinar that the work is not finished as many countries, hospitals and other healthcare facilities are still in the process of implementing the good reconstitution practices. In order to optimise the learning curve, it remains essential to share best practices and to look at obstacles in the implementation, especially from a frontline nursing perspective. There is still a lot of work ahead of us!
Therefore, the CoE Committee of Experts on Quality and Safety Standards and Pharmaceutical Care will need to follow-up the input given by EFN as the implementation is a key issue within many CoE countries as a short term strategy for implementation of CoE Resolution in CoE member countries is challenging.
The EFN will continue investing in pharmaceutical care strategies and empowering nurses within this context, especially nurse prescribing and the development of advanced practice nursing.