Prevalence of Medication Errors at Tema General Hospital
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Date
2007-08-18
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Abstract
With a lot of drugs to choose from, the most educated professional health care providers make medication errors, and somewhat less experienced providers may compound the problem. A medication error may be defined as any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm. Medication errors may be caused by factors such as: sleep deprivation, mental lapses and fatigue, inadequate knpwledge of drugs and of a patient's existing medical conditions, faulty drug identification, patient's allergies not documented, and handwriting and dosage errors. The study setting was at Tema General Hospital. It is a district referral hospital in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. The study aimed to identify the prevalence of medication errors at the hospital.
The number of errors from a sample of two hundred (200) inpatients' folders on admission was recorded over an eight-week period. The errors were categorized as errors of prescription writing, dispensing and administration. Methods used for detecting these errors were: An interviewer-administered questionnaire, analyses of sampled folders to identify causal factors,incidence reports and direct observation.
Overall, 501 of the errors, representing 48.8%, were detected as prescribing errors. A total of 187 dispensing errors representing 18.3% were detected, while 338 of the errors representing 32.9% were drug administration.
The study confirmed the view held earlier that medication errors do occur at the hospital. Moreover, the errors cut across the whole spectrum of service provided, and that medication errors seldom occur because of one person.
Description
A thesis submitted to the Department of Clinical and Social Pharmacy, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and
Technology in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science