Understanding Medication Errors Through Patient Complaints in a Danish University Hospital

Area of Science:

• Patient Safety
• Medication Safety
• Healthcare Quality Improvement

Background:

• Patient complaints offer a unique perspective on healthcare quality and safety.
• Understanding medication errors (MEs) from the patient viewpoint is crucial for improving safety.
• Traditional safety incident reports may not capture all types of medication errors.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify and characterize medication errors (MEs) reported in patient complaints.
• To compare MEs from patient complaints with those from safety incident reports.
• To assess the value of patient complaints as a complementary data source for medication safety.

Main Methods:

• Descriptive, hospital-based study analyzing 6301 patient complaints.
• Health Complaint Analysis Tool (HCAT) used to identify ME-related complaints.
• Comparison of MEs from patient complaints (n=202) with safety incident reports (n=8364) using standard taxonomy.

Main Results:

• 4.9% of patient complaints were related to medication errors.
• ME-related complaints often involved family members, nursing staff, ward events, and discharge/transfer.
• Patient complaints identified higher proportions of antiepileptic/antipsychotic MEs, prescribing errors, wrong medicine errors, and severe/fatal outcomes compared to incident reports.

Conclusions:

• Patient complaints highlight medication errors not always captured by traditional safety reporting systems.
• Patient complaints provide a valuable, complementary dataset for understanding and addressing medication safety issues.
• Integrating patient complaint data can enhance comprehensive medication safety surveillance.