Evaluation of medication errors in pediatric patients using antibiotics

Abstract

Background. Medication errors are frequently seen in pediatric patients. Medication error studies on pediatric cases were found to not only be limited but also the collaboration of clinical pharmacists and physicians on this topic was not published in Turkey. This study aimed to identify drug-related problems, especially in antibiotics.Methods. This study was a point prevalence study with pediatric inpatients that used at least one antibiotic at a pediatric tertiary care reference hospital on November 16, 2016. Medications of patients were evaluated by clinical pharmacists in terms of drug-related problems and by physicians in terms of correct indications.Results. Eighty-nine hospitalized patients were using antibiotics at the time of the study. The median age was 42 months (range: 1-226 months), and 49 (55.1%) of the patients were male. Clinical pharmacists detected a total of 210 potential drug-drug interactions in 46 (51.7%) patients. Approximately 48.5% of the patients in pediatric wards and 52.4% of the patients in surgical wards had at least one potential drug-drug interaction. A total of 39 medication errors were identified in 36 patients' drug orders. Most of the errors (51.3%) were due to dosing and administration time errors (35.9%). The number of errors per patient in surgical services was higher (0.47) than the pediatric services (0.42). Forty-three percent of errors were antimicrobial-related, and 70.5% of them were classified as dosing errors.Conclusions. Evaluation of patients' drug usage by a clinical pharmacist in terms of drug-related problems such as drug interactions, side effects and prescribing errors leads to better pharmaceutical care.

The impact of pharmacists’ interventions within the Closed Loop Medication Management process on medication safety: An analysis in a German university hospital

“…Even higher proportion of PI referring to J01 can be seen in pediatrics in our analysis. There are recent studies ( Ozdemir et al, 2021 ; Nasution et al, 2022 ) addressing the issue of antibiotics in the context of DRP in pediatrics, which underlines the impact of this therapeutic subgroup.…”

Assessment of drug-related problems in pediatric inpatients by clinical pharmacist-led medication review: An observational study

“…There is evidence that clinical pharmacist interventions reduce adverse drug events and medication errors in pediatrics [5][6][7][8][9][10] and other healthcare settings [11]. Mentioning that pediatric patients are exposed to medication errors three times more than adults in their article, Özdemir et al [12] have shown that the participation of clinical pharmacists in the multidisciplinary team is beneficial in the detection, prevention, and reduction of medication errors.…”