Demystifying medication safety: Making sense of the terminology

Medication prescribing and monitoring errors in primary care: a report from the Practice Partner Research Network

“…First, despite the breadth of the selected indicators, this set does not represent the full spectrum of medication safety. Categories such as therapeutic duplications, untreated indications, medications without an indication and medication use in pregnancy are not included 7. These categories were excluded before indicator development due to lack of defined indicators or decision support tools, or during the development process due to low clinician interest.…”

“…Next, a session was conducted at the 2007 PPRNet network meeting in which 12 primary care physicians provided iterative feedback to the research team on the content of the indicator set and a recommended number of indicators for inclusion in practice reports. Based on an available taxonomy,7 indicators were grouped into five categories: potentially inappropriate treatment, inappropriate dosing, drug–drug interactions, drug–disease interactions and monitoring or prevention of ADEs. Third, the lead clinician from each participating practice then completed a survey to prioritise 40 of the 90 proposed indicators.…”

“…More broadly, a medication error is considered to be any error occurring in the medication-use process, regardless of whether injury occurs 6. This term encompasses a much more sizeable catalogue of medication-related problems and preventable ADEs, including untreated indications, improper dosing, inappropriate medication use, failing to avoid drug–drug or drug–disease state interactions, failing to monitor a drug's effects and patient nonadherence 7. Only a fraction of medication errors result in actual ADEs, yet the avoidance of these errors is essential for optimal patient safety 5…”

Terms used in patient safety related to medication: a literature review

“…For example, “deviation between prescribed and actually administered drugs” was used to define both administration error and medication error . Another specific case utilised a definition with the same functional meanings (but not exactly equal) to define distinct terms similar to drug‐related problem , such as drug therapy problem , drug therapeutic failure , treatment‐related problem , and clinical‐drug‐related problem…”

A new approach to identify, classify and count drug‐related events

“…In contrast Ackroyd‐Stolarz et al . define two different supersets , a set of injuries and a set of non‐injuries. Thus, the ME set appears twice in both supersets.…”