Background:
To prevent medication errors in prescribing, one needs to know
their types and relative occurrence. Such errors are a great cause
of concern as they have the potential to cause patient harm. The
aim of this study was to determine the nature and types of medication
prescribing errors in an Indian setting.
Methods: The medication errors were analyzed in a prospective
observational study conducted in 3 medical wards of a public teaching
hospital in India. The medication errors were analyzed by means
of Micromedex Drug-Reax database.
Results: Out of 312 patients, only 304 were included in the study.
Of the 304 cases, 103 (34%) cases had at least one error. The
total number of errors found was 157. The drug-drug interactions
were the most frequently (68.2%) occurring type of error, which
was followed by incorrect dosing interval (12%) and dosing errors
(9.5%). The medication classes involved most were antimicrobial
agents (29.4%), cardiovascular agents (15.4%), GI agents (8.6%)
and CNS agents (8.2%). The moderate errors contributed maximum
(61.8%) to the total errors when compared to the major (25.5%)
and minor (12.7%) errors. The results showed that the number of
errors increases with age and number of medicines prescribed.
Conclusion: The results point to the establishment of medication
error reporting at each hospital and to share the data with other
hospitals. The role of clinical pharmacist in this situation appears
to be a strong intervention; and the clinical pharmacist, initially,
could confine to identification of the medication errors
