Arif Özdemir is a Pharmacist and Quality Director and the implementation ambassador in Turkey.

How did you become involved as implementation ambassador for Turkey?

 Turkish Pharmacists Association Hospital Pharmacists Committee proposed me as their representative, as I have been working with EAHP for some years as a Turkish Delegate.

Why do you believe that moving towards Statement implementation in Turkey could help to improve patients outcomes?

 As is known, thousands of people die every year in the world due to medication errors. As a healthcare worker, our most important goal is to minimize the rate of patients losing their lives due to such errors. 

In our country, health quality standards practices, which are still being carried out by the Ministry of Health, continue with great success.

Inclusion of implementation of statements to the Turkish health quality standarts will increase the quality of care of patients.

Is there a specific Statement(s) or section(s) that you thin are more relevant or urgent for Turkey?

The fact that quality standards of the Ministry of Health has been implemented for many years in our country makes it very easy to integrate many articles of implementation statements to our country. 

Of course, clinical pharmacy-related substances in a specialty branch and statement that has just started in our clinic pharmacy expertise will play a very important role in the development of clinical pharmacy services in our country.

Have you assessed your pharmacy using the self-assessment tool. Would you recommend it to your colleagues to assess their pharmacies with the tool?

Yes I already assessed our hospital pharmacy. In addition, we tell our colleagues about self-assessment tool at national and local meetings and we continue to work to increase awareness.

What do you think about the SILCC programme? Do you think it’s a helpful initiative to help hospitals to move towards implementation?

The SILCC program is a very important program that enables hospital pharmacies to evaluate themselves with the same scale hospitals at both local and national levels. 

This will enable hospital pharmacists to improve themselves in order to provide better quality service to patients