Research Article
Ganeshan S., Vishwanath A. Bog
Abstract
A medical error occurs when a health-care provider chooses an inappropriate method of care. Medical errors are often described as human errors in healthcare. A Prospective study was carried out in an In-patient Department at a general hospital, Yelahanka, Bangalore for seven months. The prescriptions were chosen randomly which includes patient’s case history, diagnosis, physician medication order sheets, lab investigations and reports of diagnostic tests. A total of 180 prescriptions which contained 392 prescribed items were collected randomly. Among 69 errors, highest no. of errors (40.57%) were related to directions. All the errors related to others constituted (20.28%) and all the errors for strength and dose constituted (18.8%.) Errors related to prescribing two drugs of the same type constituted 2.89%, 11.59% errors were under category No error which comes under sub-category A, 86.95% errors were under the category Error, No harm which comes under sub-category B(46.37%) , sub-category C (37.68%) and sub-category D (02.89%) and 1.44% belongs to category Error, Harm which comes under sub-category E. Study concludes that overall incidence of medication errors was found to be 38.12%., which is quite high. Clinical Pharmacist can play major role in the early detection and prevention of medication errors and thus can improve the quality of care to the patients.