Drug administration audit

Drug surveillance has demonstrated that inaccuracy of variable degree exists in medicine administration in hospital practice. Brooks et al. (1) found a 53%-67% incidence of dispensing errors in a study of forty general medical inpatients, but in a larger study of over seven thousand prescriptions to hospital patients, Tesh et al. (2) found only a 3% incidence of error in drug administration. Since 1974 the Aberdeen system (3), designed to reduce dispensing errors, has been used in our hospital. As an elementary effort in medical audit a study of drug administration in a general medical ward was undertaken to determine the current incidence of error.