Contributing Factors to Medication Errors Among Nurses in Iran: A Systematic Review

Medication errors have been one of the oldest and most common errors of nursing profession. Although, most medication errors do not lead to serious harm to patients, some of them could be important and has financial pressure to the healthcare system. This study was conducted to determine contributing factor of medication errors among nurses in Iran.

This was a systematic review study that was conducted through Cochrane seven-stage model. Persian articles databases including Iran Medex, SID, Irandoc, Magiran and Google Scholar were reviewed, using keywords Including medication errors, Iran and nursing. The study was conducted during 2003 to 2016.

At first, 85 studies were reviewed, then 41 of them were excluded based on the exclusion criteria. Finally, 35 papers and 9 abstracts of seminars were analyzed. The results were extracted in three contributing factors including personal factors, organizational factors, and personal and organizational factors.

The results of the present review indicated that, no factors can result in medication error separately. Most medication errors result from multiple and interactive factors. As individual factors are unavoidable in medication errors, it should be emphasized on managing organizational factors and developing teaching programs in order to prevent or reduce medication errors.