POLICY STATEMENT
Pharmaspace (Aylesbury) Ltd T/A Pharmacyspace recognise that accurate and
reliable information is fundamental and is committed to high standards of data
quality. Every care will be taken to ensure that the data and information used to
support decision making in the provision of pharmacy services is accurate, valid,
reliable, relevant and complete in line with this policy.
PURPOSE
The purpose of this document is to outline a policy framework for maintaining
and increasing high levels of data quality within the pharmacy. The pharmacy’s
approach will ensure that information is of high quality, accurate, valid, reliable,
timely, relevant and complete.
OBJECTIVES
This Data Quality Policy underpins the pharmacy’s objective to record data of the highest possible quality and that all staff who need to use the information can be confident about its accuracy.
Data quality is the ability to supply accurate, timely and complete data, which
can be translated into information, whenever and wherever this is required. Data
quality is vital to effective decision making at all levels of the organisation.
Maintaining accurate data is a complicated task for a number of reasons. For
example, there are many ways for the data to be inaccurate – data entry errors
and incomplete data, etc.
RESPONSIBILITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY FOR DATA QUALITY
Data quality is a key part of any information system that exists within the
pharmacy. All members of the pharmacy team are likely to come into contact at
some point with personal data, whether contained in paper or electronic form. As a result, all staff members are responsible for implementing and maintaining
data quality and are obligated to maintain accurate information legally (under
Data Protection legislation), contractually (contract of employment) and ethically
(professional codes of practice).
All activities relating to adding, amending and deleting information from the PMR
computer system or any other filing system in the pharmacy should only be done by those staff named to do so.