An opportunity for improvement with a medication reconciliation programme

Abstract

Medication reconciliation is priority in safety. Between 54% and 67% of hospitalized patients have at least one unintended discrepancies (UDs) between pharmacological treatment of a hospital inpatient and treatment that they were previously taking at home. Quasi-experimental pre-post study performed. The objective is to assess the impact of an intervention aimed at decreasing UDs between medication prescribed on admission and patient's regular treatment. Patients who were hospitalised for more than 24 hours and were undergoing treatment prior to admission which involved taking three or more medicines were included. The number of patients included was 331 and 3781 medicines were reconciled. The incidence of UDs decreased significantly from 7.24% to 4.18%. Omission was the most common UD, with a significant decrease from 5.8% to 3.4%. Respect to clinical impact, we observed that error type C (error reached patient without causing harm) predominates, however, experienced a statistically significant decrease from 5.3% to 2.4%.