How does ISMP reach and impact healthcare professionals?

a voluntary practitioner error-reporting program for healthcare professionals to learn about errors happening across the nation, understand their causes, and share "lessons learned" with the healthcare community. Each year, ISMP's national Medication Errors Reporting Program (MERP), receives hundreds of error reports from healthcare professionals.

Other key outreach efforts to healthcare professionals include publishing four ISMP Medication Safety Alert!^® newsletters for healthcare professionals and consumers that reach nearly a million total readers; presenting frequent educational programs, including teleconferences on current medication use issues; and offering posters, videos, patient brochures, books and other resources. Healthcare practitioners can access valuable, free medication safety tools such as lists of high alert drugs and potentially dangerous abbreviations on ISMP's website, www.ismp.org.

In addition, ISMP provides confidential consulting to healthcare organizations to help proactively evaluate their medication systems or analyze medication-related sentinel events. The Institute now is certified as a Patient Safety Organization (PSO) by the US Department of Health and Human Services.