Published 28 October 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b4450
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b4450

News

GPs and hospitals do not communicate adequately about patients’ medicines

Adrian O’Dowd

1 London

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

A failure by GPs and hospital doctors to share information about patients’ medicines could be harming patients, a report from the Care Quality Commission, the independent regulator of the English NHS, says.

The report, published on October 27, says that the NHS must do more to prevent patients coming to harm from the medicines they take after discharge from hospital.

Sharing of vital information when people move between services has to improve, says the report, for which the commission visited 12 primary care trusts (PCTs) and surveyed 280 of their general practices.

Incidents involving drugs, such as prescribing errors and failures to review medication after discharge, constituted the fourth most common category of events reported to the National Patient Safety Agency during 2008.

During visits for the study, the commission found several practices which they criticised:


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