Will pharmacy ever learn from its mistakes?

Georgia C. Richards DPhil (Oxon), BSc (Hons I) is a research fellow at the University of Oxford. We sat down to discuss fundamentally why healthcare, and specifically pharmacy, appears to be consistently poor at reporting, sharing and learning from significant and fatal incidents involving patients.

• EBM Special Study Theme (SST) Lead for the undergraduate medical school, CEBM
• Research Fellow, ODI
• Associate Editor, BMJ EBM
• Fellow, RROx

Georgia coordinates and teaches Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) and systematic review modules for the undergraduate Medical School. She has a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil/PhD) in Epidemiology from the University of Oxford (2021) and expertise in quantitative observational research, open data, open science and evidence synthesis. Georgia's list of publications is here. 

Georgia founded and leads the Preventable Deaths Tracker. She is an Open Data Institute (ODI) Research Fellow, an Associate Editor of BMJ Evidence Based Medicine, a Fellow of Reproducible Research Oxford (RROx), a Centre for Open Science (COS) Ambassador, a member of the Catalogue of Bias Collaboration, on the Steering Group for the Declaration to Improve Health Research, and a founding member of the Transparent & Open Research Collaboration in Health (TORCH).

Georgia welcomes supervision queries from undergraduate and graduate students on taught and research programmes who are interested in pursuing research in the following areas: 

• patient safety, preventable deaths, and harms in healthcare 
• pharmaco-epidemiology and pharmaco-device-vigilance
• open science, open data, and meta-research 

Georgia also welcomes contributions to the Preventable Deaths Tracker and Oxford Catalogue of Opioids.

Here are some links I mentioned in the podcast.

1. https://preventabledeathstracker.net/
2. Substack newsletter: https://preventabledeaths.substack.com/
3. Opioid deaths: https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdad147
4. Medicine deaths: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40264-023-01274-8
5. Responses using FOI’s https://doi.org/10.1007/s40264-017-0588-0
6. SR of medicine-related PFDs: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40290-023-00486-8
7. Impact of covid on medicine-related deaths: https://www.bps.ac.uk/publishing/pharmacology-matters/august-2022/pandemics,-pharmacology,-and-preventable-deaths
8. Deaths during covid: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjebm-2021-111834
9. The BJGP podcast on the private prescribing of opioids I mentioned came out last week which may be of interest: https://www.bjgplife.com/143