The Impact of Training on Medication Error Rate of the Emergency Department in Hospitals Affiliated to Golestan University of Medical Sciences

Medication errors are the most common type of medical errors that cancause serious problems for public health and are considered a threat to patient safety.This study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of patient safety trainingon nurses’ medication errors at the emergency department of a hospital of GolestanProvince in Iran. The present quasi-experimental study was conducted from March toSeptember 2016. The study population consisted of nurses working at a hospitalaffiliated to Golestan University of Medical Sciences and a sample of 40 nurses atthe emergency department of this hospital were selected through a census. Thedata collection tools used included a demographic questionnaire and Wakefield’sMedication Error questionnaire for nurses (consisting of 21 domains), which wereused once their reliability was confirmed. A patient safety training program wasdesigned and implemented for the selected emergency nurses in the form of a twodayworkshop. The obtained data were analyzed using the SPSS-18 software with theWilcoxon test. Results showed that the rate of medication errors (80.62%) of nurses wereat a low level. The majority of nurses (80.62%) scored low in terms of the frequencyof medication errors; after the training, a significantly greater number of nurses scoredlow in terms of this index (90.31%; P < 0.001). The analyses showed the effectivenessof the patient safety training program for nurses in the two domains of wrong timeerror and missed dose error (P < 0.001); however, the training had no significant effects in the other domains. As patient safety training can be effective on nurses’ medication errors,retraining courses on safe medication administration are necessary regarding nurses’significant role in the prevention of medication errors.