Patient Safety and Quality Assurance Study Guide for the PTCB Exam
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Your knowledge of Patient Safety and Quality Assurance concepts covered in this study guide will be assessed by about 26.25% of the questions on the current version of the PTCB Exam.
Potential for Risk
When working as a pharmacy technician, there is always risk for the occurence of a medication error. There are numerous steps in place to help mitigate and reduce the potential for risk. However, being mindful and aware of these certain strategies set in place will help you perform your daily tasks in the pharmacy more efficiently and error free.
High Alert/Risk Medications
High-alert and high-risk medications are those medications that are more likely to cause harm to a patient if used incorrectly or in error. For example, the blood-thinning drug warfarin has the potential to cause significant bleeding in the case of a drug overdose, drug interaction, or drug monitoring error. The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) is the primary resource for identifying high-alert medications, like warfarin.
Look-Alike/Sound-Alike (LASA) Medications
Similar medications are a serious safety concern and a common cause of medication errors. Just because two medications’ names look or sound alike does not mean they can be used interchangeably. Moreover, errors in communication or drug selection can have potentially fatal consequences.
For drugs that look like other drugs, pharmacy technicians should always double-check the drug name and strength. Tall man lettering is used on many drug products and implemented in many pharmacy systems to help pharmacy personnel differentiate two very similar looking medication names. Please refer to the Tall Man Lettering subsection below for more.
As is the case of look-alike drugs, pharmacy technicians should always double-check the drug name and strength of sound-alike drugs. Again, tall man lettering may be used when communicating in writing. Simply asking the person speaking to spell the drug name can help clarify that the correct drug is being discussed.
Error Prevention Strategies
Everybody makes mistakes.
You’ve heard this before and it’s certainly true, even in a pharmacy. But, when dealing with people’s health, a mistake can be extremely dangerous, so the goal of good pharmacy workers is to identify and acknowledge errors and reduce their occurrence. The best way to deal with medication errors is to prevent them from occurring in the first place. Many practices can be implemented, used by themselves or in combination, to reduce the chances of a medication error and, if it does occur, to reduce the likelihood that it will reach the patient.
Correct Order to Correct Patient
It is important to remember the five “rights” of medication administration: right drug, right dose, right time, right route, and right patient. Remembering these five rights will help prevent a medication error from occurring. When ringing out a customer at the register or drive-thru, it is easy to grab the wrong order and dispense it to the wrong patient, as retail pharmacies can sometimes be a fast-paced environment.
In addition to staying vigilant, performing these strategies will help get the correct order to the correct patient every time:
- Verify name and date of birth
- Verify street address
- Briefly mention what you have for the patient to pick up, like “I have your blood pressure and heartburn medication here. Was there anything else you were looking for?”
These three simple verification steps will help reduce the risk of a dispensing error.
Tall Man Lettering
Tall man lettering is used to help differentiate portions of sound-alike/look-alike drug names that are different so as to draw one’s eye to a potential source of error. Consider the example of hydralazine (an antihypertensive) and hydroxyzine (an antihistamine). These drugs look the same except for the middle three letters. Therefore, on the bottle and when communicating the drug name in writing, those different letters will be capitalized to draw the reader’s eye to the potential discrepancy (e.g., hydrALAzine vs. hydrOXYzine).
Inventory Separation
Inventory management accounts for a significant portion of a pharmacy team’s workload. Inventory management may include ordering and receiving products, identifying specific storage requirements, and removing expired or recalled medications. Schedule 2 (C-II) controlled substances are subject to additional inventory checks and balances. Within a pharmacy, different strategies to separate medications may be employed. For example, high-risk medications may be stored separately from other medications and/or medications with similar formulations may be stored together so the pharmacy employee can compare “like” products to identify the correct drug.
Leading and Trailing Zeros
Leading and trailing zeros are an important concept for a pharmacy technician to understand, especially during data entry and when performing calculations. For whole numbers, do not use trailing zeros, as in the case of 5.0; instead, simply write the whole number (5) and add units. Of note, a zero should be added before a decimal point (as in the case of 0.5 mg or 0.75 mL) to minimize the risk of overdose.
Barcodes
Similar to NDC codes, each drug’s barcode is unique and can be used to verify that the correct product is chosen. It is impossible to do this with the naked eye. Instead, a scanner may be used to scan the individual drug product into the system and to verify the correct drug is chosen in the filling process.
Abbreviation Use
Abbreviations should be avoided whenever possible. For example, “QD” should be written out as “once a day” or “daily” to avoid confusion with QID (four times a day) or QOD (every other day). In the busy work environment, abbreviations may seem faster or easier to use, but spelling out what you mean will save time—and prevent errors—in the long run.
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