Finding Consensus About the Level of Medication Safety in a Hospital Setting: Development and an Example of...

Area of Science:

• Healthcare Management
• Patient Safety Research
• Medical Informatics

Background:

• Patient and medication safety initiatives have increased significantly over the last two decades.
• Questionnaires are standard tools for assessing medication practices in healthcare settings.
• Standardized methods for collecting medication data in hospitals and synthesizing expert opinions on medication safety are lacking.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and test a novel group-level information synthesis method for assessing medication safety.
• To apply this method to estimate medication safety in an Austrian level II hospital.
• To address the need for reliable and standardized approaches to medication safety assessment.

Main Methods:

• Adapted the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) questionnaire for the Austrian inpatient setting.
• Combined classical Delphi method elements with item weight and performance weight decision-makers for reproducible expert opinion synthesis.
• Applied the newly developed method to a sample dataset and generated method descriptions and flow diagrams.

Main Results:

• Successfully generated an estimate of the medication safety level in a representative Austrian level II hospital.
• Demonstrated the applicability of the newly developed group-level information synthesis method.
• Highlighted the potential of the method to provide more reliable medication safety information compared to unstructured approaches.

Conclusions:

• The developed group-level information synthesis method shows promise for reliably assessing medication safety in hospital settings.
• The study generated a medication safety level estimate for an Austrian level II hospital.
• Further research is required to establish convergence characteristics and benchmarks for broader medication safety assessment.