NHS England's deputy chief pharmaceutical officer Clare Howard has urged community pharmacists to report more medication incidents to improve patient safety.  

It was a big concern that community pharmacists in England had reported only 19,000 medication incidents that had affected their patients' safety in the past five years, Ms Howard told the Pharmacy Show last week (September 30).  

This was despite the country's 11,236 pharmacies dispensing 1 billion items last year, she said. 

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	"It's difficult for NHS England to develop a strategy to keep patients safe and do that well if the data source isn't that rich, and it isn't that rich at the moment because primary care isn't consistently reporting incidents," Ms Howard argued.

Healthcare professionals in England and Wales can voluntarily report patient safety incidents though the NHS National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS), covering a range of incidents including accidents, medication errors, aggressive behavior or abuse.  

Reporting was inconsistent, Ms Howard said, as community pharmacists reported fewer incidents than hospitals and GPs, even though they repeatedly dispensed the most harmful drugs.  

Opioids topped the list for causing severe harm and death in patients, followed by antibiotics, warfarin and insulin, she highlighted. "These are the sorts of medicines that you dispense day in and day out and these are still causing harm to patients…We as pharmacists need to take some responsibility about how to change that," Ms Howard warned.

Figures released last month (September 28) showed that community pharmacies submitted only 1,494 reports between October 2011 and September 2012. General practice wasn't doing much better, reporting just 3,945 incidents. Hospitals reported the most incidents at 946,735.  

The type of incident most reported across the health sector in England was patient accidents (315,693), followed by medication errors (137,734), during that time period.  

The NRLS, established in 2003, includes reports that are not individually investigated but present a national picture of risks and hazards, according to its website.