Safety advocate awarded fellowship

If you find yourself needing to use a hospital’s emergency services, Dalhousie’s Stacy Ackroyd is looking out for you. Canada’s first postdoc in patient safety will spend the next two years developing and testing a way to identify medication problems in the emergency department using routinely collected electronic information.

“Not only will that help us to understand how big the problem is, it will also help to identify who is at greatest risk. This, in turn, will guide prevention strategies,” she says.

Working under the supervision of Dal pharmacy professor Neil MacKinnon, Ms. Ackroyd was awarded the Dr. David Rippey Patient Safety Fellowship Award for her proposal “Safer Medication Use in Emergency Departments.” Her research will examine the effect of long waits in the emergency department on elderly patients admitted to hospital.

Dr. David Rippey Patient Safety Fellowship Award Established in honour of the late Dr. Rippey, who was senior medical advisor to the Deputy Minister of Health in Nova Scotia. Dr. Rippey led a number of important initiatives including health services planning, physician human resource planning, and a provincial approach to health system quality, development of standards, and patient safety.

“I have been applying the science of injury prevention and control to the study of patient safety — that’s the same scientific approach that has been used to reduce injuries from causes such as motor vehicle crashes,” she says. “I know of only one other group of researchers (in the U.S.) who is using this particular approach to studying the problem.”

Ms. Ackroyd’s research will also provide important information on drug-related illnesses that result from the care received prior to arrival at the emergency department or during an emergency department visit. This information will be used to design preventative strategies to significantly improve patient safety in the health-care system.

Dr. MacKinnon notes that patient safety is certainly one of the issues of greatest importance in health care today.

“A recent survey of about 3,000 Canadians revealed the following: seventeen per cent of Canadians reported experiencing a medical, medication or laboratory error in the past year,” he says. “This number increased to 28 per cent for patients with two or more chronic conditions and 30 per cent for those who saw three or more physicians. This post doc will increase the research capacity in Canada to study these issues.”

Prior to her current postdoc, Ms. Ackroyd received her MSc in Community Health and Epidemiology at Dalhousie and is currently a candidate in the Interdisciplinary PhD Program. She was recently appointed as the research leader and as an assistant professor in Dal’s Department of Emergency Medicine, where she has worked as a researcher since 1997. She was also the lead author of the first comprehensive report on injuries in adults in Nova Scotia and was a member of the provincial Healthcare Safety Advisory Committee.

 “I have had and continue to have several advisors, mentors and colleagues who have been invaluable in their influence and support of my work over the years,” she says. “I think the other advantage I have had was the opportunity to meet Dr. Rippey and to have seen first hand what a steadfast advocate for patient safety that he was. As amazing as the fellowship is, the best part of it is to be able to bring the award named for him home to Nova Scotia.”

Among the key benefits of her research is the opportunity to work with Dr. MacKinnon, who has written extensively on issues of medication safety.

“He is so knowledgeable and well connected among medication safety researchers. He is an excellent teacher, but also allows me the freedom to learn on my own.”

Dr. MacKinnon is equally complimentary about Ms. Ackroyd: “I have no doubt she will be a leading patient safety researcher in Canada in the near future.”