Facilitating Interprofessional Collaboration on Electronic Medicines Management.

Medicines are important for well-being. Thus, medication errors can have severe consequences, even death. Transfers between professionals and levels of care are a challenge in terms of medicines management. Norwegian governmental strategies encourage communication and collaboration between levels of care, and several initiatives are invested in to improve digital medicine management. In the project Electronic Medicines Management (eMM), we established an arena for interprofessional discussions about medicines management. This paper provides an example of how the eMM arena contributed to knowledge sharing and development in current medicines management practices at a nursing home. Building on communities of practice as a method we carried out the first of several sessions, with nine interprofessional participants. The results illustrate how discussion and agreement were reached on a common practice across different levels of care, and how the knowledge required bringing this knowledge back to the local practices.

The Establishment of Communities of Practice for Electronic Medicines Management.

Digital medicines management is a high priority in Norwegian e-health strategies. A key challenge is the existence of multiple electronic information sources and systems, which require multi-professional cooperation. Lack of communication, understanding and collaboration between pharmacies, hospitals and community caregivers is also a challenge. Communities of practices (CoPs) have been used to establish arenas for discussing issues challenging the workflow to reach a common agreement on successful work practices for electronic medicines management. The purpose of this paper is to explore: How can we establish communities of practice (CoPs) to gather new knowledge on the facilitators and challenges for electronic medicines management practices in Norway? The results show engagement in establishing the CoPs and a willingness for joint enterprise. The establishment of the CoPs was performed simply based on established forms of collaboration. For CoPs to be effective, established alliances need to be expanded and renewed to form new group dynamics and thus a basis for new knowledge about electronic medicines management.