Abstract

A PROSPECTIVE STUDY: IMPACT OF MEDICATION ERROR IN A TERTIARY CARE HOSPITAL

Dr. Arpan Dutta Roy, Dr. Rupak Kundu, Dr. Suchanda Gadre, Mr. Pabitra Sahoo, Dr. Soham Mazumdar

ABSTRACT

Background: To explore and estimate the frequency of medication error, a study conducted in a Tertiary Care Hospital, Kolkata. The medication error can be divided into Prescribing errors, Dispatching Error, Drug Administration Errors and Indenting Errors. The purpose of this study is to determine the prevalence and nature of medication errors; to explore the causes and to study corrective actions for such medication error. Objective: Identify and evaluate the failures of medication errors in a Tertiary Care Hospital, Kolkata and suggest solutions on reducing medication errors. Design: Survey analysis, based on the medication error events from a prospective cohort study. Participants: Admitted patients of three months i.e. August to October 2016. Methods: Trained observers like nurses, pharmacists & doctors tend to cause Medication Error during writing medicine card. Data was collected by Clinical Pharmacist, who are specially trained to identify medication errors. A prospective cohort study was conducted by using the direct observational method. Descriptive analysis of the prevalence and nature of medication errors was conducted in SPSS V20 and Excel V10. The descriptive analysis has been followed to find median difference in error rates between last three months error reports. Result: The most common errors were in prescription error, accounting for 54.68 % of the 139 errors. Dispatching Error was associated with 38.13 % of overall errors. In the last three months, most of the cases incident reached the individual but did not cause harm. The overall error rates detected in this study were respectively August- 2.06%, September-2.22%, October-1.77%. Conclusion: There are plenty of factors that need to be applied in health care to prevent or reduce medication error. Many of the disasters in patient care occur due to the errors. These medication errors are not usually due to incompetence but due to ignorance of the consequences following an error and many more minor preventable reasons. There are several on-going quality improvement programs conducted for monitoring medication error that helps to minimize the overall error rates day by day.

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