Prevention and Reduction of Medical Errors: A Narrative Review
Keywords:
Medications, Errors, Prescription, Prevalence, Reporting.Abstract
Introduction: Information technology has been a mainstay for reducing medication errors. Despite success at reducing medication errors, technology such as physician order entry and bar code-assisted administration systems require considerable financial investment, healthcare professional training, and system maintenance. This review aimed to highlight the strategies for the prevention and reduction of medical errors in different health settings.
Methods: A systematic search of literature relating to medical errors in prescribing, transcribing, dispensing, administration, and documentation in adults and children. The search strategy included all ages, all languages, and all types of trials and studies. References from eligible articles were also hand-searched in order to identify additional relevant papers. We included all types of studies, such as randomized controlled trials, non-randomized controlled trials, longitudinal studies, cohort or case-control studies, and descriptive studies that reported the incidence of medication errors or identified the causes in different countries, either in adults or children.
Results: The results of this search strategy revealed that more than 500 articles were eligible for this review however many studies were excluded as they were excluded, as the papers were reviews, letters, conference papers, opinions, reports, or editorial papers. This left 14 articles for full-text retrieving and four additional relevant studies were identified after hand-searching of the references of these studies. Forty-five articles were therefore finally relevant and are included in this systematic review. The abstracts of four studies were in English but the full texts were in foreign languages which were excluded.
Conclusions Medical errors and adverse events are very common in various health settings, and among them the most prevalent involves medications. Many valid indicators have been developed and the prevention of medical errors and adverse events requires combined changes in ICU organization and healthcare worker behaviors.
