What are the most common types of medication dispensing errors?

The three most common dispensing errors are: dispensing an incorrect medication, dosage strength or dosage form; miscalculating a dose; and failing to identify drug interactions or contraindications. Errors caused by drug administration can be made by the health care provider or by the patient themselves.

What are the top 5 medication errors?

Top 10 medication errors and hazards, according to medication…

• Zinc overdoses.
• Using syringes for vinca alkaloids.
• Unsafe labeling of prefilled syringes and infusions by compounders.
• Wrong route errors with tranexamic acid.
• Unsafe use of IV push meds.
• Unsafe overrides with automated dispensing cabinets.

What is dispensing medication error?

Definition of a dispensing error A dispensing error is a discrepancy between a prescription and the medicine that the pharmacy delivers to the patient or distributes to the ward on the basis of this prescription, including the dispensing of a medicine with inferior pharmaceutical or informational quality [1–6].

What are the common dispensing errors?

The most commonly observed dispensing errors include missing doses, omission of items, incorrect patient name, and incorrect drug name. The percentage of errors to total prescriptions filled was 1.2% in in-patient pharmacy, 2.3% for the pediatric pharmacy, and 2.6% for the adult outpatient pharmacy.

How do you manage medication errors?

Here are 10 tips that may help.

1. The ‘rights’ of medication administration.
2. Know your medication administration policies, regulations and guidelines.
3. Keep focused.
4. Have a drug guide available at all times.
5. Be aware of high alert medications.
6. Consider name alerts.
7. Double check diagnosis.
8. Speak up.

What causes medication errors?

The most common causes of medication errors are: Poor communication between your doctors. Poor communication between you and your doctors. Drug names that sound alike and medications that look alike.

What are common prescription errors?

The prescription errors are classified as omission errors related to prescriber (including patient name, age, prescriber name, prescriber signature, patient visited department and diagnosis), omission errors related to drugs (including route, dose, frequency, dosage form and quantity to supply) and commission errors ( …

What are 4 of the most common type of dispensing errors that occur in pharmacy?

The most frequent dispensing errors reported were dispensing the wrong medicine, dispensing the wrong drug strength, and dispensing the wrong dosage form.

What are the consequences of medication errors?

Consequences faced by physicians after medication errors can include loss of patient trust, civil actions, criminal charges, and medical board discipline.

What are 4 common causes of medication errors?

How do medication errors happen?

• Poor communication between your doctors.
• Poor communication between you and your doctors.
• Drug names that sound alike and medications that look alike.
• Medical abbreviations.

How you can reduce the errors in prescription?

10 Strategies to Reduce Medication Errors

• MINIMIZE CLUTTER.
• VERIFY ORDERS.
• USE BARCODES.
• BE AWARE OF LOOK-ALIKE SOUND-ALIKE (LASA) DRUGS.
• HAVE A SECOND PAIR OF EYES CHECK PRESCRIPTIONS.
• DESIGN EFFECTIVE WARNING SYSTEMS.
• INVOLVE THE PATIENT.
• TRUST YOUR GUT.

How to reduce liquid medication errors and dosing tools?

Liquid Medication Errors and Dosing Tools: A Randomized Controlled Experiment Recommending oral syringes over cups, particularly for smaller doses, should be part of a comprehensive pediatric labeling and dosing strategy to reduce medication errors.

What happens if you take the wrong dose of a liquid medicine?

One common error with liquid medicines involves taking the wrong dose. This occurs because of confusion between different dose measurements. For example, liquid medicines can be dosed in household measurements (teaspoons or tablespoons) or in the metric system (milliliters).

What should you do after measuring liquid medicine?

After measuring liquid medicine, immediately replace the cap. If small children either live in your home, or will be visiting, be sure child-resistant caps are on. If using a syringe with a special adapter that allows medication to be drawn directly from the bottle (figure 1), be aware it may not be childproof.

What happens if you overfill a liquid medicine syringe?

If you overfill a cup or dosing syringe when measuring, discard the excess medicine down the sink. Don’t try to pour any excess or unused medicine back into the container. Doing so will contaminate the medicine that is left in the container. To ensure accurate dosing, don’t combine more than one liquid medicine in a dosing device at the same time.