[Adaptation and validation of checklists to detect medication prescription and dispensing errors]

Adverse effects of medications are an important source of morbidity. Prescription and dispensing errors are an important cause of these adverse effects.

To adapt and validate two checklists, one to measure errors in handwritten prescriptions and other to detected errors in the medication dispensing process of hospital pharmacies for outpatient care.

The study was conducted in three stages. First, checklists for medication errors developed elsewhere were adapted. Afterwards, the checklists were reviewed by experts. Finally, the inter and intra-observer reliability of each checklist was assessed, testing them in 32 occasions by two independent observers.

The checklists for medication prescription and dispensing were composed by 12 and seven items, respectively. They were corrected according to experts' opinions. The intraclass correlations of the results of each tester were 0.68 and 0.82 for the prescription and dispensing error checklists, respectively.

The developed checklists for the detection of errors in prescription and dispensing of medications are reliable en can be applied in future studies.