Contact: Jane Murray, jane.murray@worldpharmacycouncil.org

World Patient Safety Day, led by the World Health Organisation (WHO), focuses on raising awareness and ensuring that patient safety is recognised as an international health priority.  The theme of 2022’s World Patient Safety Day is “Medication without harm”, which is the focus of the current WHO Global Patient Safety Challenge.

Community pharmacies worldwide play a pivotal role in optimising medication safety. Unsafe medication practices and medication errors are a  leading cause of avoidable harm worldwide, and may result from a combination of issues relating to prescribing, dispensing, administering, and monitoring.  The World Pharmacy Council (WPC) encourages pharmacists worldwide to continue their efforts to prioritise medication safety, including through taking action to minimise medication-related harm in three key focus areas: monitoring polypharmacy, reducing harm from high-risk medicines and improving medication safety at transitions of care. Community pharmacists are the most accessible health care professionals, and community pharmacies are the most frequently visited health care destination for many patients around the world. To ensure their effectiveness as medication experts, it is essential that community pharmacists are included as a core component of collaborative health care.

President of the WPC Doug Hoey said that “pharmacists and other healthcare professionals must collaborate together to promote safe medication practices which help to minimise medication errors and reduce medication-related harm”. 

“Not only within primary healthcare, but also in the transition between hospital care and the community, pharmacists have a highly pertinent role in ensuring and improving the safety of medication use for all patients, in particular those who take medicines with a high side effect-profile or who take many medicines.  The community pharmacist is the gatekeeper to ensure medicines safety for the patient”.

September 17, 2022

World Patient Safety Day: Statement from WPC
'Medication Without Harm'

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