A prospective study on medication errors in a general hospital

摘要

A medical error occurs when a health-care provider chooses an inappropriate method of care. Medical errors are often described as human errors in healthcare. A Prospective study was carried out in an In-patient Department at a general hospital, Yelahanka, Bangalore for seven months. The prescriptions were chosen randomly which includes patientrsquo;s case history, diagnosis, physician medication order sheets, lab investigations and reports of diagnostic tests. A total of 180 prescriptions which contained 392 prescribed items were collected randomly. Among 69 errors, highest no. of errors (40.57) were related to directions. All the errors related to others constituted (20.28) and all the errors for strength and dose constituted (18.8.) Errors related to prescribing two drugs of the same type constituted 2.89, 11.59 errors were under category No error which comes under sub-category A, 86.95 errors were under the category Error, No harm which comes under sub-category B(46.37) , sub-category C (37.68) and sub-category D (02.89) and 1.44 belongs to category Error, Harm which comes under sub-category E. Study concludes that overall incidence of medication errors was found to be 38.12., which is quite high. Clinical Pharmacist can play major role in the early detection and prevention of medication errors and thus can improve the quality of care to the patients.