AIMS (Assurance and Improvement in Medication Safety)

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The AIMS (Assurance and Improvement in Medication Safety) Program is a standardized medication safety program that will support continuous quality improvement and put in place a mandatory consistent standard for medication safety for all pharmacies in the province. Its goal: to reduce the risk of patient harm caused by medication incidents in, or involving, Ontario pharmacies.

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The program enables practitioners to learn from medication incidents, and better understand why they happen and how they can be prevented. Utilizing both a preventative approach through proactive reviews of work processes to identify areas of risk and retrospective reviews of specific medication incidents, pharmacy professionals will be able to identify learnings that will help prevent incidents and enhance patient safety.

September 2019:

Learn about the first independent expert bulletin providing a preliminary analysis of medication incidents and near misses reported to the AIMS Program recording platform in College Welcomes First Expert Bulletin to Improve Medication Safety in Pharmacies. The College has also published a AIMS Data Snapshot: September 2019 supplement to provide a statistical summary. These resources are important in helping pharmacies, the public, and the broader health system understand the information that is now being collected for the first time in Ontario and how it can be used to promote patient safety.

The AIMS Program:
  • Requires shared accountability between pharmacies, for the systems they design and how they support staff; and pharmacy professionals, for how they manage medication incidents;
  • Emphasizes learning and accountability, through a safety culture where individuals are comfortable bringing forward medication incidents without fear of punitive outcomes; and
  • Enables sharing of lessons learned from medication incidents through reporting, resulting in ongoing process improvements to minimize errors and maximize health outcomes.