Speaking at Hospital Pharmacy Europe’s Virtual Study Day on IV medicines safety, Adam Sutherland discusses what the NHS is doing – and can do – to support IV safety. Here, you have exclusive access to the session recording.
In the UK, around 10% of all intravenous (IV) administrations are thought to be associated with some form of error, with between 0.1% and 1% of these doses being harmful. Scaled up across the NHS, this means one to two million patients are potentially harmed by IV medicines each year.
With such a complex health system with widespread variability, some level of medical administration error is perhaps inevitable, but a range of measures and innovations have been adopted across the NHS to control those errors and help to reduce harm, with more in the pipeline.
Adam Sutherland is associate professor in healthcare quality and safety at the University of Bradford School of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences. He is a pharmacist and researcher in patient safety, with a particular interest in the implementation and design of ‘smart pump’ technology and standardising technical processes for IV infusions.
In this session, Adam shares an overview of the IV medication safety challenges and what the NHS is doing about it in 2025. He covers the prevalence and nature of IV medical administration errors, how they emerge in NHS systems and why blaming an individual is never the right way to approach them.
He also delves into the emerging interventions aiming to mitigate medical administration errors and the NHS workstreams in place to support these, as well as the ways in which pharmacists can get involved to influence the way new systems are shaped.
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