Barriers to Reporting Medication Errors in Nurses of Teaching Hospitals in Gorgan City in 2021

Medications are the most common therapeutic intervention, and the safe use of medication and the existence of processes to improve the safety of medicine are of prime importance. Since nurses have a major role in implementing medication orders, they play a vital role in promoting safety and reducing medication harm to patients. Therefore, the present study was conducted to determine the barriers to reporting medication errors by nurses of teaching hospitals affiliated with Gorgan, Iran, in 2021.

In this cross-sectional study, 340 nurses from Gorgan teaching hospitals were selected by a randomized stratified method in 2021. The data collection tool was a demographic information checklist and a valid questionnaire of barriers to reporting medication errors. The collected data was analyzed using SPSS software (version 16). Moreover, descriptive statistics, Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests, Spearman, Mann-Whitney, and Kruskal-Wallis correlation coefficients were used.

The average age of the nurses was 33.11 ± 7.36 years, and 290 (85.3%) participants were female. The average score of reporting obstacles in the area of "fear of management factors" was higher than other areas (3.20±0.50), followed by the areas of "fear of reporting consequences" (3.17±0.35) and "factors related to the reporting process" (2.87±0.63) were in the next ranks. The highest average in the areas of "fear of the consequences of reporting", "factors related to the reporting process" and "fear of managerial factors", were respectively related to "fear of legal issues" (3.94±1.11), "unclear definition of medication error" (3.54±1.05), and "disproportionality of the officials' reaction with wrong hierarchy of importance" (3.75±0.96). The service sector had a significant relationship with the overall score of barriers to reporting medication errors (P=0.020) and the area of fear of managerial factors (P=0.017) in a way that the barriers to reporting medication errors by the nurses of the Emergency Department were higher than the other parts.

Among all reporting barriers, "fear of legal issues" had the highest score. Due to the existence of factors such as fear of judicial issues and the inappropriate reaction of hospital officials, it is suggested to define the error reporting process and how to handle medication errors and train hospital managers on how to deal with the person at fault.