Collaborating

Collaboration brings together pharmacy team members, patients, healthcare providers, and pharmacy regulators across Canada to create safer pharmacy care through shared understanding and collective action.

Collaborating in CIRCL includes:

• Team-based incident analysis where pharmacy staff work together to understand what happened and why. Each team member brings a unique perspective that can help identify contributing factors that might otherwise be missed.
• Open disclosure with patients when medication incidents occur. This includes acknowledging the incident, explaining what happened, and discussing steps being taken to prevent recurrence. This transparent approach helps maintain trust and can provide valuable insights from the patient's perspective.
• Information sharing with healthcare providers involved in the patient's circle of care. This ensures coordinated follow-up and monitoring for any effects of the incident as appropriate.
• Contributing to a national collaborative effort by sharing de-identified incident data with pharmacies across Canada. This broader collaboration enables identification of patterns and trends that might not be visible at the individual pharmacy level, creating a more comprehensive understanding of medication safety issues.
• Learning from other provinces through the shared national database. BC will benefit from the experiences and insights of the provinces that have already established mandatory medication incident reporting programs, while also contributing our own data to strengthen the collective knowledge base.
• Working with pharmacy owners and employers to foster a culture of patient safety and a just culture in the workplace environment. This collaborative approach recognizes that safety is everyone's responsibility.