The moment of realization when a pharmacy professional knows that something has gone wrong is always a difficult one. The thoughts that race through your mind as you retrace your steps or follow the work of someone on your team…
How many days ago was that?
What was the dosage?
How could this happen?
Even more difficult is the conversation with the patient.
What do you mean?
Will I be okay?
What do I do now?
“No pharmacist or pharmacy technician ever wants to do harm,” says Brad Willsey, ACP’s Registrar. “We care for our patients, and bottom line that’s just something that we never want to do.”
These situations are never easy, but how a pharmacy team reacts and responds makes all the difference.
Enter CQI+.
ACP’s new continuous quality improvement program was developed to expand upon activities already familiar to pharmacy teams. It incorporates the documenting of practice incidents, analyzing them to identify root causes, and taking action to address gaps and prevent recurrence.
“This program is not a new idea, it’s an evolution,” says Brad. “We’ve always been doing the reporting, but now we need to build a culture and an environment where it’s safe to report, where there’s no blame being placed on individuals.”
That culture is built upon five key activities: prevent, respond, analyze, improve, and communicate. Together they will help pharmacy teams build a collaborative environment where they work and learn together to keep their patients safe.
Pharmacy teams won’t be alone. By submitting anonymized data to a national database, every pharmacy team has the opportunity to learn from one another’s experiences and teach each other. This contributes to a key goal that ACP Council defined in its 2021-25 strategic plan.
“Right now, it’s mostly done locally, maybe in a binder on paper,” says ACP Council member and pharmacist James Frobb. “But if we see that larger scale data that is possible with centralized reporting, as pharmacy professionals we will realize that we’re not alone.”
Pharmacy teams can spot trends and gaps and work towards addressing them with better processes and procedures. They won’t be the only ones learning.
“The role of the regulator is to protect the health of Albertans,” says James. “With this data we can look at the big picture and, in the future, adjust the standards of practice to help pharmacy teams reduce practice incidents.”
As pharmacies across Alberta move to implement the program by the February 1, 2026, deadline, Brad hopes that they embrace the opportunity in front of them.
“We really want to encourage that safety culture in our pharmacy environments, because at the end of the day, it all comes back to the patient,” says Brad. “CQI+ is another tool that we can use to make sure that we’re providing safe and effective care to all Albertans.”
In this issue of Full Scale, you’ll find out how CQI+
- can help to avoid pharmacy team members feeling blamed,
- follows the tenets of just and safety culture,
- was developed with the assistance of patients with first-hand experience,
- can be a benefit to workload and staff management, and
- ties into a national database to inform pharmacies across Alberta and Canada.
