Increasing patient safety due to an implemented ward pharmacist in an interprofessional cancer care team evaluated in a prospective, controlled intervention study

Pharmacists can improve quality of cancer care and patient quality of life, but systematical investigations of the quantitative improvement of patient safety by integrated ward pharmacists (WP) in cancer care teams are still rare.

To systematically investigate the effect of an implemented ward pharmacist on the reduction of medication errors (ME) and thus increasing patient safety.

P₀ (retrospective control phase) forms the baseline with no pharmaceutical intervention. In P₁ and P₂ (prospective intervention phases) WP acted as a team member, performing interventions, and solving ME as part of the daily routine. Throughout all phases, two pharmacists independently identified all remaining ME from archived patient files. ME were considered as clinically relevant after confirmation by an oncologist.

The three phases with 52, 46, and 50 patients, respectively, were comparable regarding the baseline characteristics. For better comparability, ME refer to the number of monitored medications (MM) corresponding to one drug per day. The statistical analysis showed a significant reduction of clinically relevant ME for all intervention phases compared with the retrospective control phase (P₀: 33 MEs/100 MM versus P₁: 7 MEs/100 MM versus P₂: 2 MEs/100 MM; p < 0.001).

Implementation of a WP significantly reduced ME and, consequently, increased quality of cancer treatment as well as patient safety. Thus, the contribution of a WP to the interprofessional team is crucial for enabling comprehensive cancer patient care.