Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disease. Delayed administration of PD medications is associated with increased risk of life-threatening complications including choking, aspiration pneumonia and neuroleptic malignant syndrome. In 2016, the spouse of a patient with PD wrote to Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust (LTHT) to highlight that multiple medication delays and omissions had occurred during his recent admission. In response, LTHT formed a PD quality improvement (QI) Collaborative of multidisciplinary members committed to ensuring timely PD medication administration. The faculty used Institute for Healthcare Improvement Model for Improvement QI methodology. Interventions were tested on pilot wards and the most successful were scaled up and spread across all 90 adult inpatient wards as an 'intervention bundle'. Between January 2016 and June 2020 mean delays in the time from admission to first dose of medication dropped from over 7 to under 1 h. The mean percentage of omitted PD medications reduced from 15.1 to 0.6%. Project success was multifactorial but due to:

. Simplicity of interventions.

. Multiprofessional ownership by frontline teams to make changes and take prompt action.

. The spouse of the patient taking a leading role in the Collaborative, bringing her unique personal insight and experience, which facilitated behavioural change.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	parkinson's disease, patient safety, medications, prevention, inter-disciplinary, older people, quality improvement
Research Division:	Health Sciences
Research Group:	Health services and systems
Research Field:	Health management
Objective Division:	Health
Objective Group:	Specific population health (excl. Indigenous health)
Objective Field:	Health related to ageing
UTAS Author:	Alty, J (Associate Professor Jane Alty)
ID Code:	144174
Year Published:	2020
Web of Science® Times Cited:	1
Deposited By:	Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre
Deposited On:	2021-04-27
Last Modified:	2022-08-23
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