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Building safer health care business practices

Safe Assured is an international community pharmacy safety research consortium focused on enhancing the safety and sustainability of community pharmacy practice. 

From 2010–2014, the team’s research assessed the potential for a mandatory error (quality-related events) reporting system in Nova Scotia—designing and developing the system’s methodology to show 'proof of concept.' From 2014 to 2017, the research focused on how best to implement a mandatory error reporting system. Since then, the team’s Nova Scotia research has demonstrated the importance and efficacy of mandatory error reporting. 

Current research

As mandatory error reporting and other safety enhancement programs spread across Canada, Save Assured now leverages its Nova Scotia experience to lead new research and outreach programs nationally and internationally.

Specifically, Safe Assured’s current research aims to improve health care business practices by providing innovative research and evidence-based safety recommendations for pharmacists, pharmacy providers, patient safety advocates, regulators, and public policy officials:  

• Assessing the pharmacist’s user experiences with error reporting systems
• Assessing the uptake of new safety practices in community pharmacies
• Developing and implementing new and innovative data analytics, mining, and machine learning methods
• Mapping and modelling risk in community pharmacies
• Identifying and employing best practice governance models for pharmacy stakeholders
• Developing best practice continuous quality improvement (CQI) practices for pharmacy providers and regulators
• Translating knowledge to enable more practical safety tools
• Developing governance mechanisms for health policy makers
• Building safer, more reliable and more resilient community pharmacy business practices.

For more details about current research projects and links to recent papers, see Recent Publications.

Additional information

The research produced by Safe Assured and SafetyNET-Rx has resulted in the publication of numerous papers on community pharmacy in Nova Scotia since the initial implementation of their program.

• For a description of the history of Safe Assured and SafetyNET-Rx, see "Background".
• For a complete list of the team's publications, see "Bibliography of Published Work".