Increasing numbers of patients are surviving the intensive care unit. Concordant with our shifting focus to minimizing intensive care unit-acquired morbidity, in the present issue of Critical Care Moyen, Camire, and Stelfox describe the importance of quality pharmacotherapy. They describe challenges and potential solutions to this source of iatrogenic injury in our vulnerable patients. Their ar...

OBJECTIVE assess the safety of medication dispensing processes through the dispensing error rate. METHOD Cross-sectional study carried out at a pharmaceutical service of a pediatric hospital in Espírito Santo, Brazil. Data collection was performed between August and September 2006, totaling 2620 prescribed medication doses. Any deviation from the medical prescription in dispensing medication ...

Analysis of medication errors can lead to system improvement and reduced risk only if the errors are detected, reported, and used to design better patient-care practices and systems. Voluntary medication error reporting systems rely on the ability and willingness of individual physicians, pharmacists, and nurses to detect and report errors as part of their routine practice. Because of the centr...

purpose: to evaluate the incidence of medication error in patients who underwent intraocular surgery based on different methods of drug instruction (hand-written versus orally explained) at labbafinejad medical center. methods: during a 6-month period, we evaluated 204 postoperative patients who underwent cataract or glaucoma surgery. patients were randomly assigned to two groups; in group i, p...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate whether pharmacists completing the medication management plan in the medical discharge summary reduced the rate of medication errors in these summaries. DESIGN Unblinded, cluster randomised, controlled investigation of medication management plans for patients discharged after an inpatient stay in a general medical unit. SETTING The Alfred Hospital, an adult major refe...

BACKGROUND Although children are at the greatest risk for medication errors, little is known about the overall epidemiology of these errors, where the gaps are in our knowledge, and to what extent national medication error reduction strategies focus on children. OBJECTIVE To synthesise peer reviewed knowledge on children's medication errors and on recommendations to improve paediatric medicat...