Primary care teams’ reported actions to improve medication safety: a qualitative study with insights in high reliability organising

BACKGROUND: Our aim was to understand actions by primary care teams to improve medication safety. METHODS: This was a qualitative study using one-on-one, semistructured interviews with the questions guided by concepts from collaborative care and systems engineering models, and with references to the care of older adults. We interviewed 21 primary care physicians and their team members at four primary care sites serving patients with mostly low socioeconomic status in Southwest US during 2019–2020. We used thematic analysis with a combination of inductive and deductive coding. First, codes capturing safety actions were incrementally developed and revised iteratively by a team of multidisciplinary analysts using the inductive approach. Themes that emerged from the coded safety actions taken by primary care professionals to improve medication safety were then mapped to key principles from the high reliability organisation framework using a deductive approach. RESULTS: Primary care teams described their actions in medication safety mainly in making standard-of-care medical decisions, patient-shared decision-making, educating patients and their caregivers, providing asynchronous care separate from office visits and providing clinical infrastructure. Most of the actions required customisation at the individual level, such as limiting the supply of certain medications prescribed and simplifying medication regimens in certain patients. Primary care teams enacted high reliability organisation principles by anticipating and mitigating risks and taking actions to build resilience in patient work systems. The primary care teams’ actions reflected their safety organising efforts as responses to many other agents in multiple settings that they could not control nor easily coordinate. CONCLUSIONS: Primary care teams take many actions to shape medication safety outcomes in community settings, and these actions demonstrated that primary care teams are a reservoir of resilience for medication safety in the overall healthcare system. To improve medication safety, primary care work systems require different strategies than those often used in more self-contained systems such as hospital inpatient or surgical services.