A cross‐sectional study on prescribing and dispensing errors at a corporate hospital in South India

Abstract

Background The substantial and increasing use of medications escalating the risk of harm globally. The serious medication errors in hospital and community settings resulting from patient injury and death. Hence, a cross‐sectional study was aimed to analyse the prescribing and dispensing errors in the outpatient departments of a south Indian hospital. Materials and methods A prospective cross‐sectional study was carried out to evaluate the prescribing, and dispensing errors in outpatients who seek patient counseling at the tertiary care multispecialty hospital. The data were collected from various sources such as patient's prescriptions and dispensing records from the pharmacy. Results A total of 500 prescriptions were screened and identified 65.60% of prescriptions with at least any one type of medication errors. Out of 328 prescriptions, 96.04% were handwritten and 3.96% were computerised prescriptions. Among the 328 prescriptions with medication errors, 32.62% noticed prescribing errors, 37.80% with dispensing errors, and 29.58% with both prescribing and dispensing errors. Out of these 328 prescriptions, 74.09% prescriptions were found to have polypharmacy. Discussion Medication errors are serious problems in healthcare and can be a source of significant morbidity and mortality in healthcare settings. The present study showed that dispensing errors were the most common among the types of medication errors, in these particularly wrong directions were the most common types of errors. Conclusion This study concludes that the overall prevalence of medication errors was around 80%, but there were no life‐threatening events observed. A clinical pharmacist can play a major role in this situation appears to be a strong intervention and early detection and prevention of medication errors and thus can improve the quality of care to the patients.

Medication errors analysis in Asia and Australia: A systematic review

“…There are 37 articles that discuss the incidence of MEs and their factors in Asia, where the articles consist of 9 articles from Southeast Asia [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] ; 3 articles from East Asia [19][20][21] ; 7 articles from South Asia [22][23][24][25][26][27][28] and 18 articles from West Asia [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46] . A total of 2 articles discuss the incidence of MEs and their factors in Australia [47][48] .…”

“…The term "dispensing error" refers to a discrepancy between a prescription and the medication that the pharmacy distributes to the patient or the ward based on this prescription, including the dispensing of a medicine with lower pharmaceutical or informational quality 31 . There are 14 studies reported wrong drug including into dispensing errors 17,21,23,25,[31][32][33][34][35][36][39][40][43][44]49 , so wrong dose is the most common type of errors. In addition, wrong dose is also included in dispensing errors.…”

“…There are 6 studies reported wrong label including into dispensing errors 17,23,34,36,39,49 , for example in Thailand Fentanyl 5 mcg/ml labelled as 10 mcg/ml 17 . Four studies from Taiwan, Yemen, UAE, and Saudi Arabia reported that wrong quantity of drugs are including into dispensing errors 21,[33][34]41 .…”

“…Another type of prescribing errors are wrong patient identification 13 , which was done by study in Philippines. Six studies from Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, and Australia explain that incomplete prescription identities are include into prescribing errors 11,14,20,23,42,47 . Zirpe et al explain that incomplete prescription is the major reason for transcription error.…”

Corrigendum

“…In the article by Kandasamy et al, 1 the funding information of ‘This work was supported by the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Khalid University, Abha, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with project number GRP 339’ was incomplete and it should read as ‘This work was supported by the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Khalid University, Abha, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with project number GRP/339/42.…”