A severe shortage of pharmacists on the wards in hospitals means large numbers of medication errors are not being prevented, the president of the Hospital Pharmacists Association of Ireland said yesterday.
Ms Joan Peppard said only a handful of hospitals here have clinical pharmacists, but in Britain, health authorities had been directed by the Department of Health since 1988 to employ sufficient clinical pharmacists.
These pharmacists advise doctors on correct doses of medicines as well as on the actual drugs which would be available to treat individual patients. "By not having these pharmacists here, we are missing one of the safety barriers for preventing errors."
She said ward-based pharmacists in Dublin's Tallaght Hospital caught and corrected about 1,000 errors a month in doctors' prescriptions. The lack of these specialists in other hospitals meant medication errors, which related to mistakes in the prescribing, dispensing and/or administration of drugs, were going unchecked.
Calling for greater numbers of hospital pharmacists, she said the service at present was "seriously undervalued and under-resourced". The pharmacist to bed ratio in the Republic, she said, was well out of line with practice in the US and Britain.
"The safe use of medicines for all patients in hospitals has been jeopardised," she claimed. In addition, the facts about pharmacy services for cancer patients "are not pleasant", pointing out that few hospitals employed oncology clinical pharmacists.
"These skilled professionals are highly regarded abroad and seen as essential members of the oncology service," Ms Peppard said. "Furthermore and equally important is the fact that the basic provision of locally prepared cancer-treating drugs is hopelessly inadequate.
"Outside of the Dublin region," she added, "each health board has deficiencies in the provision of these drugs, hence patient needs are compromised."
She said to compensate, hospitals were forced to buy ready prepared drugs from private commercial units. "This denies many patients their individually tailored drug treatments and also potentially beneficial drug trial materials. The alternative for other patients is their attendance at treatment centres in Dublin."