Medication errors feature firmly in New Zealand’s national data on Serious and Sentinel events. As part of a wider project promoting Medication Safety and Medication Error Prevention at our hospital, a literature search was conducted to identify the incidence of Medication Errors or near misses in the inpatient setting. This summary outlines some of the causative factors identified including bo...

Polypharmacy, defined as the concurrent use of four or more medications by a single patient, is ever-increasing. It enhances the risk of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) and can represent a huge burden to patients. Medication reviews are the proposed panacea for reducing such problematic polypharmacy. These reviews conducted on patients aged 65 years or over can be aided by activation of the STOPP...

Medication administration and laboratory processing/results reporting are examples of complex systems in healthcare that are known to be error prone. At Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, errors with IV medication drips and laboratory processing and results reporting were well documented. The purpose of this paper is to describe our initial experience utilizing the Six Sigma methodolog...

purpose : to compare the effectiveness and safety of trabeculectomy with mitomycin c (mmc) versus trabeculectomy with oculusgen methods : in this prospective study 14 eyes of 7 patients with a diagnosis of primary open angle glaucoma (poag) that required trabeculectomy for both eyes were enrolled. for each patient we randomly performed trabeculectomy with mmc for one eye and trabeculectomy with...

Introduction: According to WHO, patient safety is the prevention of errors and adverse effects to patients associated with health care. There is a significant impact of physical environment on health and patient safety. Identifying and eliminating built environment conditions that negatively impact patient safety during various phases of construction of healthcare facilities is a strong need of...

Computerized medication alerts (e.g., drug-drug interaction alerts), which are intended to protect patient safety, should also be designed to support prescriber workflow. However, relatively few studies have examined the use of medication alerts during patient care processes. To assess barriers associated with the use of medication alerts, we directly observed medication prescribing during rout...