The cost of dispensing errors in Iranian health system: a retrospective evaluation

The problem of medication errors (MEs) has constantly been receiving considerable attention worldwide due to their health impact and costly consequences. MEs occur in all phases of prescription, preparation, administration, distribution and delivery to the patient; however, dispensing errors are more common in this study, we have attempted to identify various MEs that occurred by pharmacists and calculate their financial and physical harm costs.

This was a 8-year retrospective study.

This study evaluated the costs of MEs in the Iranian health system caused by dispensing mistakes from 2012 to 2019. We retrieved documents and reports from the Tehran Medical Council Archive. Then, we extracted dispensing error data from ME record forms and analyzed them using SPSS software.

Cost of dispensing errors.

Among 3000 available MEs documents, only 2.6% of cases were dispensing errors. Errors included dispensing of wrong medication (75.6%), delivering expired medicines (11.5%), wrong medication order (9%), wrong medicine compounding (2.6%) and wrong dose of medication (1.3%). The most common cause of dispensing errors was physicians' poor handwriting (23.1%). Legal reactions, due to MEs, occurred in a range of actions from written reprimand in the professional records to some months of deprivation from professional activities.

The analysis of the MEs that lead to the legal prosecution in the Iranian Medical Council shows that most cases, according to the severity of harm, were dispensing wrong medicines which caused temporary patients harm.