Nursing students' perspectives of the cause of medication errors

Medication errors complicate up to half of inpatient stays and some have very serious consequences. To our knowledge, this is the first qualitative study of Iranian nursing students' perspectives of medication errors.

To describe nursing students' perspectives of the causes of medication errors.

Four focus groups were held with 24 nursing students from 4 different academic semesters in the nursing school in Tehran, between November 2011 and November 2012. Using a qualitative descriptive design, themes and subthemes were identified by content analysis.

Two main themes emerged from the data: "under-developed caring skills in medication management" and "unfinished learning of safe medication management", which was subdivided into "drifting between being worried and being careful", and "contextualising pharmacology education". All respondents felt that their education programmes were leaving them vulnerable to "drug errors" and cited incidents where patient safety had been jeopardised.

Nursing curricula need to increase investment in medicines management. If nursing students are to become competent, skilful and safe practitioners, their learning will require extensive support from their academic institutions and clinical mentors.