Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what his Department’s five-year strategy is for tackling medication errors and medication-related harms in the NHS.

Medication errors and medication-related harms in the National Health Service are included in the 10-year NHS Patient Safety Strategy, which was published in July 2019.

Within this Strategy, the Medicines Safety Improvement Board is working to reduce medication errors and harms in the NHS, focusing on high risk drugs, situations and vulnerable patients. Work already underway includes the accelerated rollout of electronic prescribing in hospitals, monitoring higher risk prescribing practice linked to hospital admissions, and deploying more clinical pharmacists into primary care and care homes.