Educational Interventions Affecting Medication Error Reporting by Healthcare Professionals in Secondary and Tertiary...

Many healthcare systems are striving to improve patient safety, as medication errors are a significant cause of avoidable morbidity and mortality. This systematic review aims to quantitatively and qualitatively assess the impact of educational interventions on medication error reporting.

A systematic review of the literature was conducted from database inception to December 2024 across EMBASE (Ovid), MEDLINE (Ovid) and PsycINFO (Ovid). Any study examining educational strategies affecting medication error reporting in secondary and tertiary care settings in the English language was included, except for cross-sectional studies. Search terms included healthcare professionals, educational interventions, medication error reporting, and secondary and tertiary healthcare. Two independent reviewers screened titles, abstracts, full-text studies, extracted the data and undertook quality assessment using the Risk of Bias in Non-Randomised Studies of Interventions (ROBINS-I) tool to assess the risk of bias in the included studies. Finally, data were synthesised as a narrative review to summarise all educational interventions.

The systematic search led to 3649 titles. Fourteen studies were eligible for inclusion. Most of the studies were non-randomised experimental studies and assessed the medication error reporting quantitatively, but not qualitatively. The studies reported improvements in medication error reporting rates, nurses' overall reporting competence, and healthcare professionals' form completion skills following educational interventions.

A better understanding of educational intervention methods, rationales, time frames, frequency, and effective co-interventions may improve medication error reporting. Combining education with other interventions had positive outcomes related to medication error reporting compared with education alone. Educational interventions improved the quantity and some quality measures of medication error reporting.