Targeted Medication Safety Best Practices for Community Pharmacy

The ISMP Targeted Medication Safety Best Practices for Community Pharmacy were developed to identify, inspire, and mobilize adoption of consensus-based Best Practices for specific medication safety issues that can cause patient harm, despite repeated warnings. 

This is ISMP's first set of Best Practices for community and ambulatory pharmacy settings. ISMP launched its Targeted Medication Safety Best Practices for Hospitals in 2014. The Best Practices presented in this guidance document have been reviewed by an external expert advisory panel. As with the acute care-focused Best Practices, the document will be updated as needed every two years. 

ISMP encourages community pharmacies to focus their medication safety efforts on these Best Practices, which are realistic and have been successfully adopted by numerous organizations. While targeted for the community pharmacy setting, some Best Practices are applicable to other healthcare settings. 

The Best Practices contained within this document address the following issues:

• Preventing wrong patient errors when filling prescriptions, responding to questions, and administering vaccines
• Expanding and maximizing the use of barcode scanning during medication and vaccine dispensing and administration 
• Avoiding errors involving inadvertent daily dosing of methotrexate for non-cancer indications 
• Standardizing the use of metric (milliliter--mL) units of measure when prescribing, dispensing, and measuring oral liquid medications 
• Using information about medication safety risks and errors that have occurred in other organizations to take preventative action 
• Obtain and use a patient's weight to verify dosing of weight-based medications
• Maximize the use of technology to prevent errors during the return-to-stock (RTS) process
• Establish standard processes to prevent errors during vaccine preparation and and administration

A worksheet designed to assist pharmacies in analyzing their current status with implementing the ISMP Targeted Medication Safety Best Practices for Community Pharmacy is available here. 

Download the Guidelines

^{How to cite: Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP). ISMP Targeted Medication Safety Best Practices for Community Pharmacy. ISMP; 2025}