Initiatives to identify and mitigate medication errors in England

In response to the EU Directive on Pharmacovigilance, the National Health Service (NHS) in England and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in the UK have formed a partnership to work together to simplify and increase medication error reporting, improve data report quality, maximise learning and guide practice to minimise harm from medication errors by sharing incident data. This initiative will facilitate implementation of new requirements for medication error reporting and reduce the need for duplicate data entry by frontline staff. The initiative is also intended to provide new types of feedback from the National Reporting and Learning System run by the NHS England and from the Yellow Card Scheme run by the MHRA and to improve learning at the local level by clarifying medication safety roles and identifying key safety contacts to allow better communication between local and national levels. Finally, the partnership has established a new National Medication Safety Network to provide a forum for discussing potential and recognised safety issues, and for identifying trends and actions to improve the safe use of medicines. This article describes the initiative, the structure of which may act as a template for other countries.