AbstractsMedical & Health Science

Assessing and improving the quality of pharmaceutical care is a major issue in hospitals nowadays. Medication safety strategies are being developed and widely introduced in hospitals to reduce medication-related harm. Surgical patients are at risk for medication-related harm, also called adverse drug events. Their type of medication used, their multiple transfers along the surgical pathway and the surgical procedure itself might play an important role considering medication safety. Quality assessment of pharmaceutical care is essential to monitor whether certain medication safety strategies are indeed effective in reducing medication-related harm. This thesis focuses on the assessment of the quality of pharmaceutical care in surgical patients using developed process and outcome tools for measurement: medication-related quality indicators and a surgical trigger tool with expert judgement to assess adverse drug events. Also, the improvement of the pharmaceutical care was assessed by measuring the effectiveness of a medication safety strategy with a focus on ward-based interventions by a hospital pharmacy team.