OBJECTIVES The under-reporting of medication errors can compromise patient safety. A qualitative study was conducted to enhance the understanding of barriers to medication error reporting in healthcare organisations. METHODS Focus groups (with physicians, pharmacists and nurses) and in-depth interviews (with risk managers) were used to identify medication error reporting beliefs and practices...

The National Health Service, in its report An organisation with memory, has called for a fundamental rethinking of the way the healthcare system learns from error. The NHS further details its goal to reduce serious medication errors by 40% in a second report entitled Building a safer NHS: improving medication safety. This report calls for a review of paediatric medication delivery systems to as...

BACKGROUND Patient safety is an ongoing global priority, with medication safety considered a prevalent, high-risk area of concern. Yet, we have little understanding of the supports and barriers to safe medication management in the Canadian home care environment. There is a clear need to engage the providers and recipients of care in studying and improving medication safety with collaborative ap...

A 1999 Institute of Medicine report received national attention by highlighting system vulnerabilities within health care and indicating that medication errors are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality. One area of concern was the increased number of errors occurring in the prescribing phase of the medication-use process due to prescribers’ lack of essential drug knowledge and patient info...

Medication errors have important effects on increased length of hospitalization, increased mortality and costs. We assessed the incidence of medication errors and characterize the error types in an emergency department in a large teaching hospital in Tehran. We also investigated the effect of Emergency Department pharmacists on patient safety with regard to recovery of potentially harmful m...

This report is an overview of the medication safety studies conducted by the VISN (Veterans Integrated Service Network) 8 Patient Safety Center of Inquiry (PSCI), Tampa, FL, over the past 5 years. The Center has been developing the research capacity to conduct national Veterans Health Administration (VHA) proactive medication safety surveillance studies as part of its research focus on patient ...