Welcome to managing veterinary medicines: staying legal and promoting safety

This webinar is part of Managing Veterinary Medicines: Staying Legal and Promoting Safety, a webinar series to provide information on veterinary medicines’ regulations and safe and responsible use of veterinary medicines in practice, brought to you by the VMD and RCVS Knowledge.

Alison Pyatt:

Hi everyone, and welcome to this short podcast to introduce you to the new online resource, brought to you by the Veterinary Medicines Directorate and RCVS Knowledge. And the podcast is entitled, Managing veterinary medicines: Staying legal and promoting safety. I’m Alison Pyatt, and I work in the international office here at the VMD, and I also lead the VMD Training Centre.

The VMD Training Centre has been established to help us to provide information, training courses, and regulatory updates for all of our stakeholders. It was formed in a direct response to requests from stakeholders across the veterinary and veterinary medicine sectors. And we’ve been working in collaboration with our RCVS Knowledge for a while now to help deliver other online learning program initiatives, which you may have seen. These courses have been so well received by yourselves that we decided to embark on another training series to cover veterinary medicines regulations, an important topic for all in the sector.

When we set up the VMD Training Centre, we completed a stakeholder consultation activity to find out which subject areas would be beneficial. And veterinary medicine regulation was indicated as a priority area. So here we are. But before we go into the details on the course, I’d like to introduce my co-lead on this development from RCVS Knowledge. Pam.

Pam Mosedale:

Hi, my name’s Pam Mosedale. Thanks, Alison. I’m Quality Improvement Clinical Lead at RCVS Knowledge. And the role of Quality Improvement is to help practices to make changes leading to better outcomes for patients, better systems for the practice, and better learning. And I know from my time at practice standards at RCVS that practices can struggle to keep up with medicine’s legislation. So we were very happy to assist VMD with this free resource consisting of six hours of CPD, which should help practices to comply with legislation, but also help to keep animals, team members and clients safe when prescribing and dispensing veterinary medicine. So Alison, why did VMD get involved in this particular project?

Alison Pyatt

At the VMD, we want to be able to support all practices and all veterinary team members to be able to use and store medicines correctly, and an understanding of the underpinning regulation will assist with this progress. So Pam, why did RCVS Knowledge wish to work with us on this project?

Pam Mosedale:

Well, did you know, Alison, that in human healthcare, 1700 people per year die as a result of medication errors? That’s awful, isn’t it? We don’t know the true figures in veterinary practice, but we do know that 30% of errors reported to the VDS’s VetSafe system are medication errors. That’s why we think it’s so important to have good robust systems in place in the practice dispensary and to use QI tools like guidelines, protocols, and checklists to improve medication safety.

Dispensary processes can be audited as well to ensure compliance from legislation from VMD’s point of view, but also to ensure better practice. And when errors with medicines do occur, it’s usually a system problem. So practices can learn from them and improve systems rather than just blaming individuals. Now that’s why we thought it was a very worthwhile project.

Alison Pyatt:

And what can you expect from this series? There’s four modules within the course. The first introductory module on regulation. This provides an introduction to the VMD, a reminder of what our roles are and what we do and what our responsibilities are. And there’s a webinar to discuss why an understanding of the legislation is so important to all within the veterinary profession.

Responsible and legal use of medicines is the focus of module two, including prescribing, supplying, and dispensing veterinary medicines. The prescribing cascade and safe use of control drugs are also covered. And this module also provides an update on anthelmintic resistance and antimicrobial resistance. Pam, would you tell us what’s in the second two modules?

Pam Mosedale:

Yes, that second module sounds like it has a lot of content there, which will be really useful to practices. Module three covers everything about running the dispensary, dispensing management within the practice. It covers safety, waste reduction, sustainability, and we also talk about the role of SQPs and veterinary practice.

And the final module talks about how we can use Quality Improvement in the dispensary, how we can use audits, as I mentioned earlier, and how we can put in place systems to try and avoid medication errors.

So really what we’d both like to do is ask you to have a look at these amazing free resources.

They’re there to help you and we’d love them to be well-used. Also, if you complete all the sections and the quizzes with them, you’ll get a CPD certificate for six hours of free CPD, which should be really useful for practice standards. If your practice is a veterinary hospital, you’ll need to have attended training. So yes, please just go and have a look.

Alison Pyatt:

Yes, so please do have a look at the resources that are available. This could be really useful for your future VMD inspections.

Pam Mosedale:

Thanks everyone. Bye.

Alison Pyatt:

Bye.