Preventing medication errors in community pharmacy: frequency and seriousness of medication errors

Area of Science:

• Pharmacy Practice
• Patient Safety
• Medication Errors

Background:

• Medication errors pose risks to patient health and require documentation for quality improvement.
• Danish community pharmacies actively record prescription corrections, dispensing errors, and near misses.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the frequency and seriousness of medication errors in Danish community pharmacies.
• To analyze different types of reported incidents, including prescription corrections, dispensing errors, near misses, and adverse drug events.

Main Methods:

• Data collected from 40 randomly selected Danish community pharmacies over a defined period.
• Utilized existing reporting systems for prescription corrections, dispensing errors, and near misses.
• Implemented a pilot web-based reporting system for adverse drug events.

Main Results:

• A total of 1606 incidents were recorded: 976 prescription corrections, 229 near misses, 203 dispensing errors, and 198 adverse drug events.
• Error rates per 10,000 prescriptions were 23 for corrections, 1 for dispensing errors, and 2 for near misses.
• The transcription stage of dispensing was associated with the most frequent and potentially serious errors reaching patients.

Conclusions:

• Prescribing errors were the most frequently reported incident type.
• Although infrequent, medication errors reaching patients were often potentially harmful.
• Optimizing learning from reported incidents is crucial for enhancing patient safety in primary care.