Vishranti Pandya has a lot going on in her pharmacy.
A pharmacist owner and licensee at a downtown Calgary Shoppers Drug Mart, Vishranti has a complex practice, to say the least. Her pharmacy is just blocks away from a large supportive housing complex for individuals who have experienced mental health concerns, addictions, and homelessness. It’s a far cry from the quiet local practice she first worked at in Vermilion, serving a senior population.
“We learn every day here, but it’s amazing, it’s a new side of practice,” she says.
Vishranti faces constant challenges, ensuring her team can deliver person-centred care to a large population with opioid use disorder, taking part in community awareness about naloxone kit distribution, and organizing special training for her team with the Calgary Police Service and the staff at the housing complex.
But despite everything going on, she makes time for one thing above all else.
“Whoever is working in pharmacy, it doesn’t matter if they are an assistant, a student, a pharmacy technician, a pharmacist, they all care about the patient care.” she says. “The last thing they want to do is to dispense the wrong medication. That’s everyone’s nightmare, right?”
At her pharmacy, Vishranti uses safety culture to build a collaborative environment and unite her team in pursuit of the common goal of patient safety. Using Pharmapod, the software deployed by Shoppers Drug Mart across its chain of pharmacies, she brings her team together in the reporting of practice incidents and close calls. Everyone, including unregulated employees, is empowered and expected to contribute.
“All of us have our own login ID and password, all of us have the extensive training,” Vishranti says. “So, if a pharmacy assistant encounters a practice incident or close call, they don’t have to wait for me or someone else to come in and do the reporting. They go right in and document everything.”
This also helps distribute workload for her staff.
“That helps the pharmacists a lot because, like we know in Alberta, we have a broad scope of practice,” says Vishranti. “Our pharmacists are involved in patient care so much, sometimes doing all of the documentation is one small extra step to them. It helps us a lot.”
Reporting everything into the software has even helped her to improve the monitoring of her team’s workload.
“You can easily see the trend where you’re seeing the most errors happening in your pharmacy,” Vishranti says. “Let’s say around a certain time, I’m seeing more practice incidents and close calls. Maybe I need to put one or two extra staff in, so that also helps me as a business owner to adapt workflow in the organization so that we can provide great patient care.”
But it’s not just about recording information, it’s the action afterward that provides the real benefit. Vishranti reviews all of the reported data and then gathers her team together to discuss everything, to help develop herself as a pharmacy professional as well as others.
“I ask my other staff members to put in their input as well for the problem solving and coming up with strategies, so we minimize the chances of the same incident in the future,” she says. “What were the factors? What we can do?”
With the launch of ACP’s new CQI+ program, Vishranti sees the validation of everything she has been doing with her team.
“When I was going through the guide and the other material that ACP has posted so far for CQI+, I did mention to Katie1 that this is a great program,” she says.
Virshranti is especially excited for every pharmacy in Alberta to join the program and see how reporting to the National Incident Data Repository for Community Pharmacies (NIDR) will be able to provide more information for her to bring forward in the future.
“This will be a great way to learn from other pharmacies. What they have documented about a practice incident or close call, I’m going to share with my pharmacy team,” she says. “We can easily relate to this error. This could have happened to us, too. How about let’s implement a little change so that we don’t make the same error at our pharmacy?”
The biggest thing Vishranti wants to tell her fellow pharmacy professionals is to look at CQI+ as an opportunity, not a task.
“This is not just for your own team but for other pharmacies,” she says. “Every time you document a practice incident or a close call, you’re giving all the pharmacies across Alberta and Canada an opportunity to learn.”
- ACP pharmacy practice consultant Katie Swan ↩︎
