Background: Hospital pharmacy preparedness to support activ- ities overload in case of emergency and disaster situations is increasingly needed even in relatively safe developed countries. In 2016, the International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP) published guidelines to help pharmacists to prepare and respond to natural disasters.
Purpose :To review how European hospital pharmacies are pre- pared for disasters in compliance with the FIP guidelines. Material and methods An electronic survey (SurveyMonkey) based on the FIP guidelines was conducted with the support of the European Association of Hospital Pharmacists in European hospital pharmacies. Some additional questions were added to improve the general knowledge on disaster prepared- ness in our continent. Descriptive statistics were used to ana- lyse the results.
Results: Three-hundred and seven surveys were completed in 28 countries. France (20%) and Spain (19%) were the countries with the highest numbers of answers. Half of the responders analysed their regional disaster’s risk but 65% of responders never practised emergency drills. Fifteen per cent of pharmacies have experienced at least one major event in the past 5 years. Fifty-six per cent of those phar- macies created and promoted internal guidelines for impending emergency versus 23% for those who have not experienced disasters. Among pharmacies having experienced disaster, 70% judged their emergency procedures appropriate for the needs of such situations and 40% organised post-disaster debriefing to improve their future response.
Conclusion: These results highlight that most European hospital pharmacies are not fully compliant with the FIP guidelines. However, the pharmacies having experienced disaster are more likely to create and promote internal disaster standard operating procedures. Further analysis and benchmarking are warranted worldwide, as well as promotion of the FIP guidelines.