Thank you, Madam Chair.
On behalf of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices Canada, I would like to thank you for inviting us to be part of your study on post-market surveillance. ISMP Canada is an independent national not-for-profit organization established for the analysis of medication error or incident reports. Our purpose is to identify underlying contributing factors or causes and to make system-based recommendations for enhanced patient safety.
We are working together with the Canadian Institute for Health Information and Health Canada to develop the Canadian medication incident reporting and prevention system. We also work closely with the Canadian Patient Safety Institute and other organizations and associations working to advance medication safety and patient safety at a provincial, national, and international level.
Our area of expertise is analysis of the preventable subset of adverse drug events. We know from a number of studies, including the Canadian adverse events study and two studies in the U.K., that a large proportion of adverse drug events are in fact preventable.
Through the shared learning from reports of medication incidents that we have received, we've made approximately 195 recommendations for consideration by hospitals as safeguards in their medication use systems. Of those, approximately 50 have now been adopted by CCHSA, the Canadian Council on Health Services Accreditation, as required practices.