The Welsh Assembly has urged pharmacists to help improve patient safety in high-risk medicines such as warfarin, antipsychotics and NSAIDs, as part of its 1,000 Lives Plus programme.

The programme, which is being run in partnership with the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS), aims to improve the quality of patient care and reduce avoidable harm across NHS Wales. Ministers stressed that pharmacists could play a "crucial" part in reducing the number of hospital admissions created by adverse drug reactions or not taking medicines as prescribed.

The report backed the role of MURs in improving medicines safety and recommended further interventions in particularly high-risk medicines. It advised pharmacists to avoid dispensing 5mg tablets of warfarin unless absolutely necessary, to challenge anti-psychotic prescribing in dementia and to ensure patients had adequate gastroprotection when prescribed NSAIDs.

The RPS said pharmacists would be "vital" in making Wales the safest place in the world to take medicines

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But pharmacists would not be able to do the work alone, the report stressed, advising them to make use of frontline staff to implement the strategy. It also recommended that pharmacy teams continually monitor their progress, rather than periodically assessing their work through clinical audits. RPS Wales director Paul Gimson said pharmacists would be "vital" in the project's goal of making Wales the safest place in the world to take medicines. The comments were echoed by chief pharmaceutical officer for Wales Professor Roger Walker, who argued that all health professionals would need to work together to improve patient outcomes.

And Community Pharmacy Wales welcomed the programme's recommendations. "The safety of patients through their use of medicines is of prime importance to all community pharmacies in Wales," a spokesperson for the group said. "The campaign has a valuable role to play in addressing the high numbers of medication errors experienced when patients come out of hospital, which the pharmacy profession in the community and in hospitals is also working together to tackle."

Meanwhile, the NPA said the work would encourage continuous improvement in healthcare. "There are many areas where improvements can be made and this is evident in the early results from the discharge medicines review service, which has identified a medicines error rate of more than 70 per cent in discharge processes," NPA representational manager in Wales Steve Simmonds told C+D.

Read the full 1,000 Lives Plus report.