Amy Rosenberg, Pharm.D., BCPS, doesn’t ever want to see a patient hurt because of a medication error.

Rosenberg is a clinical specialist in UF Health Shands Pharmacy Services and a clinical assistant professor in the College of Pharmacy. She works
to improve patient care through a focus on medication safety.

“I coordinate all of the investigations and risk-reduction strategies that we put into place after a safety event has occurred in any department,” Rosenberg said. “I am the pharmacy person who reacts and investigates those events and tries to figure out how to prevent those from happening in the first place.”

She said her job can be broken down into two parts: proactive and reactive. On the proactive level, she works on a large team and together they focus on always looking out for things that could potentially cause an error.

On the reactive level, Rosenberg and her team work to identify problems in medication safety and come up with solutions to these issues.

“It’s about helping us be the best we can be and protecting us from our humanness,” she said.

For the first half of her career at UF Health Shands, Rosenberg worked as lung transplant pharmacist.

“We had some medication errors that I was involved with investigating and trying to put solutions into place,” she said. “I really enjoyed seeing improvement that broadly and widely affected lots of patients.”

Some of the practices Rosenberg and her team have implemented to prevent medication errors include manually applying heat-sealed wrapping to high-risk medication vials, storing medication in lidded bins and not allowing large concentrations of certain medicines in the hospital.

Rosenberg said, “We have very defined protocols that everyone who is involved in taking care of the patient is aware of.”