Medicative therapy plays pivotal roles in preventing and curing diseases.
However, medication errors can cause serious patient harm in many cases.
"A medication error is defined as any preventable event that may cause
or lead to inappropriate medicati...
Medicative therapy plays pivotal roles in preventing and curing diseases.
However, medication errors can cause serious patient harm in many cases.
"A medication error is defined as any preventable event that may cause
or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm, while the
medication is in the control of the health care professional, patient, or
consumer. Such events may be related to professional practice, health care
products, procedures, and systems including: prescribing; order
communication; product labeling, packaging, and nomenclature; compounding;
dispensing; distribution; administration; monitoring; and use" (National
Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting and Prevention,
U.S.A.).
In the First Chapter, I presented the object, necessities, and methods of
this study.
In the Second Chapter, I defined the meaning of the medication errors ꠏꠏ
for, I think, the notion itself is not so familiar even to health care professionals
in Korea ꠏꠏ, explored the causes of various types of the errors, and
made a brief inquiry into the social aspects of the errors.
Medication Errors can be categorized into: Prescribing errors, which
includes errors of commission such as incorrect drug, dose, dose interval,
dosage form, quantity, route or rate of administration selection, and illegible
prescriptions and medication orders that result in errors in patient's drug
regimen; Dispensing errors, which includes dispensing incorrect expired or
degraded drugs, dispensing incorrect dose or dosage form, incorrect directions to patients, failure in counselling patient for proper use of drugs,
and failure in correcting problems in prescriptions or patient's drug regimen;
Administration errors, which includes administration of unauthorized
medication including administration of wrong dose of dosage form, failure
by the caregiver to administer an ordered medication at schduled time
including omission of administration, and administraion of expired drug;
and Patient's errors of noncompliance with the directions of doctors and
pharmacists.
The most common causes of medications are: simlar drug names,
packages and labelling; illegible prescriptions resulting in errors in
dispensing and patients' regimen; and abbreviations causing confusion of
drug names and/or directions for use.
Of course, the socioi-economic factors such as poor facilities, instruments
and shortage of human resources inevitable from profit-seeking health care
systems are unneglectable causes of the medication errors.
Legal responsibility for a medecation error falls on the person who
offered the cause of the error.
In the Third Chapter, I analyzed some prescriptions obtained from a
pediatric sector of a hospital.
Analyzing prescriptions itself does not give any evidence of medication
errors, whereas we can draw some features of the prescriptions which may
lead to medication errors without profound attention.
The results of the analyzation shows some tendency of overdosing compared
with prescriptions in Medical Index of the hospital, frequent use of
antibiotic medicines, and frequent use of drugs contraindicated and/or
alerted by the Medical Index.
In the Fourth Chapter, I tried to grope for the preventive measures to the
medication errors.
In the first section, I showed some guidelines the health care professionals
should abide by to prevent medication errors. In the second section, I proposed some institutional devices such as
Medical Error Finding System which encourages concentration and systematic
analysis of prescriptions, Medication Information Center which provides
physicians and pharmacists with full informations on drugs and medicines,
and Medication Error Reporting System which enables the professionals to
prepare preventives by analyzing the errors reported.
In the third section, I briefly discussed the working conditions of the
health care workers, and told about the necessities to overcome the present
profit-seeking health care system.
The Last Chapter concludes briefly the whole discussions.