Understanding Medication Errors Through Patient Complaints in a Danish University Hospital

Patient complaints are an important source of data, as they may help illuminate medication safety issues from the patient's perspective. We aimed to identify and describe medication errors (MEs) reported in patient complaints and compare them with MEs from safety incident reports. This descriptive hospital-based study (1) compared patient complaints with and without MEs using the Health Complaint Analysis Tool (HCAT) and (2) analysed MEs identified in both patient complaints and incident reports using the standard taxonomy of the reporting system. Of 6301 complaints, 310 (4.9%) were related to MEs. Compared with other complaints, ME-related complaints were more often submitted by family members (ratio 1.6), directed towards nursing staff (ratio 2.5), involved ward-based events (ratio 4.3) and occurred during discharge or transfer (ratio 2.9). Following selection and additional deduplication procedures, 202 MEs were identified in patient complaints. Compared with 8364 MEs from safety incident reports, patient complaints revealed higher proportions of antiepileptic and antipsychotic medication (ratio: 1.9), prescribing errors (ratio: 1.5), wrong medicine errors (ratio: 1.6) and errors with severe or fatal outcomes (ratio: 14.6). Patient complaints may uncover unique MEs not captured by traditional reporting systems. They may serve as a valuable complement to safety incident reports.