Medication Errors and its Reporting by Nurses of Intensive Care Units of Ardabil in 2017

Drug therapy is an important part of the patient's care process which its proper and safe observance is of standard emphasis and its neglecting may give rise to errors and unrecoverable complications for the patient. Evaluation of medication error is necessary for error management and providing safe care to patients. The aim of this study was to determine the rate of medication error and its reporting in nurses of the intensive care units in Ardabil.

This descriptive cross-sectional study was performed on 208 nurses of intensive care units selected by census method in Ardabil city in 2017. The data gathering tool was a revised Medication Error Questionnaire of Joolaei and colleagues which analyzed by descriptive statistics and statistical tests including Mann-Whitney, Kruskal-Wallis and Spearman correlation coefficient in SPSS-22 software.

Data analysis showed that 86.4% of nurses had at least one medication error in the last 6 months. The mean of errors during this period was 3.6 cases per nurse, 2.68% of the errors led to physical injury and 19.46% of them was reported by the nurses to unit heads. The mean of error report was 0.7 cases for each nurse. The most common types of medication errors were included giving medication early or delayed (41.1%), not giving the prescribed medication (37.7%) or giving several oral medications together (30.9%).

The results of the study indicate a high prevalence of medication error and, at the same time, a low level of error reporting. Therefore, it is recommended to hold rehearsal classes in relation to pharmacology and the principles of proper implementation of drug orders, to adopt management solutions to encourage nurses to report drug errors and to investigate the causes of the mismatch of the error report with the error rate and the factors influencing it.