British Columbia has a new medication incident reporting program

The College of Pharmacists of British Columbia (CPBC) has launched CIRCL—which stands for continuous improvement, reporting, collaborating and learning.CIRCL is a new comprehensive incident reporting program that’s designed to enhance safety through structured reporting, analysis and learning from medication incidents that occur throughout the province.CIRCL will aim help pharmacy teams approach safety by building on top of the quality management requirements that already exist in BC and create a more structured and consistent approach to preventing medication incidents. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), medication incidents are the leading cause of injury and avoidable harm in healthcare settings around the world. The CPBC says that the most common complaints they receive relate to medicine dispensing errors by pharmacists. CIRCL aims to stop those errors and prevent injuries through proactive identification of risks, analysis of incidents and implementing prevention measures. CIRCL is based on the Model Standards of Practice for Continuous Quality Improvement and Medication Incident Reporting developed by the National Association of Pharmacy Regulatory Authorities (NAPRA), making it consistent with approaches across Canada while including provincial adaptations. B.C. is one of eight other provinces that have established mandatory medication incident reporting programs that align with NAPRA. There are four foundational elements for CIRCL: Continuous improvement, which means ongoing review and enhancement of all aspects of care delivery in the pharmacy, reporting, which creates a foundation for understanding by standardizing documenting incidents and near misses to identify patterns, collaborating, which brings together all team members working in a pharmacy as well as patients, other healthcare providers and pharmacy regulators, and learning, which will take incidents and turn them into opportunities for education.Pharmacy teams must implement the new reporting platform by July 1, 2026. They must also hold a team meeting before June 1, 2027 with subsequent meetings at least annually to review incidents. Pharmacists must also conduct safety self-assessments before June 1, 2027 with subsequent assessments every three years. Finally, medication incidents must be documented with information like date, type of incident, who discovered it, medication system stages involved, medications involved, degree of harm, incident description and contributing factors.To get ready for CIRCL’s implementation, the CPBC is developing resources for pharmacists which can be seen on their website. There will also be communications sent out to College members with more guidance and support. All pharmacies in B.C. must fully implement CIRCL by June 1, 2026.

British Columbia has a new medication incident reporting program

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