New national guiding principles for safer use of medicines
The Australian Government has released new national guiding principles to encourage safer use of medicines for consumers, the Minister for Health and Ageing, Tony Abbott, said today.
View by date:
Previous MinistersPDF printable version of this page (PDF 23 KB)
19 August 2005
ABB097/05
The Commonwealth Government has today released new national guiding principles to encourage safer use of medicines for consumers.
The guiding principles, developed by the Australian Pharmaceutical Advisory Council, will help improve the safe and effective use of medicines as consumers move through different health care situations, including in hospitals and residential and community care.
The Guiding principles to achieve continuity in medication management have been developed for all health care providers, such as hospitals, nursing homes and other health institutions. This new publication updates a 1998 edition that is currently used in health institutions. Adoption of these guiding principles will help reduce problems relating to medicines.
Governments and health care professionals including doctors, pharmacists, nurses and allied health professionals, health services, consumers and their carers have a shared responsibility to overcome these problems.
The guiding principles will be distributed widely to public and private hospitals, health professionals, consumer groups and relevant government and non-government agencies.
The government hopes that everyone involved with medicines in the health sector will cooperate in putting these new Guiding principles in place. State and territory health departments will also be asked to implement the principles within their jurisdictions.
An electronic version of the new principles is at: http://www.health.gov.au/internet/wcms/publishing.nsf/Content/nmp-guiding
For more information call Mr Abbott's office on ph 02 6277 7220.
Help with accessing large documents
When accessing large documents (over 500 KB in size), it is recommended that the following procedure be used:
- Click the link with the RIGHT mouse button
- Choose "Save Target As.../Save Link As..." depending on your browser
- Select an appropriate folder on a local drive to place the downloaded file
Attempting to open large documents within the browser window (by left-clicking)
may inhibit your ability to continue browsing while the document is
opening and/or lead to system problems.
Help with accessing PDF documents
To view PDF (Portable Document Format) documents, you will need to have a PDF reader installed on your computer. A number of PDF readers are available through the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) Web Guide website.
