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The following is issued on behalf of the Hospital Authority:
With the successful change of the manual reporting of medication incidents to an electronic reporting system, the Hospital Authority (HA) today (January 31) relaunched the ¡§Medication Incident Reporting Programme¡¨ (MIRP) Bulletin as a risk management tool to safeguard patient safety.
The MIRP was first established in 1994 as a continuous quality improvement initiative through regular case sharing and statistical analysis of reported incidents in a regularly published bulletin. Publication of the bulletin was suspended pending the switch to an electronic reporting system which would enhance efficiency in reporting and facilitate more in-depth data analysis.
¡§Before the relaunch of the bulletin, our efforts to further enhance medication safety have progressed,¡¨ HA Director (Quality & Safety) Dr Leung Pak-yin said.
¡§The Hospital Authority established the Medication Safety Committee several years ago which has developed and implemented key projects in the safer handling of drugs through issuing more updated safety guidelines and organisation of training and sharing sessions with local and overseas experts,¡¨ Dr Leung said.
¡§On the broader front of risk management and patient safety, the Hospital Authority implemented a Sentinel Event Policy last October. Important lessons of patient safety are shared among health care professionals through a bi-monthly publication ¡¥HA Risk Alert¡¦.¡¨ The second issue of the ¡§HA Risk Alert¡¨ is also published today.
Both the ¡§MIRP Bulletin¡¨ and ¡§HA Risk Alert¡¨ have been distributed to all health care providers in public hospitals for continuous quality improvement purpose and can be accessed by the public at http://www.ha.org.hk/ho/mirp and http://www.ha.org.hk/riskalert.
Ends/Thursday, January 31, 2008
Issued at HKT 17:28
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