Medication Error: A Formal Definition for Medical Error

Running head: MEDICATION ERROR AS THE QUALITY INDICATOR
MEDICATION ERROR AS THE QUALITY INDICATOR
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MEDICATION ERROR AS THE QUALITY INDICATOR
Medication error can be defined as the failure that occurs in a treatment process while
caring for the patient by the Healthcare professionals. This has the potential to harm patients
resulting in severe threatening outcomes on their health as well as on their lives (Bogner
2018). Medication errors can occur anytime while deciding which medicine and dosage
regimen should be provided to the patient, manufacturing the formulation of the medications,
dispensing the formulation, administering the medicine, during the monitoring therapy, and
many others. Medication error can be classified into a number of psychological
classifications of errors that can be knowledgeable action as well as memory based errors.
Medication errors can range from less serious to highly threatening for the patient even
resulting in preventable hospital death (Vancott et al. 2018). Therefore researchers have
stated that it is important for the detection of medication errors since System errors which
might lead to minor errors in the initial stages can later turn to serious errors in the latter
stages. Therefore, reporting of such areas should be encouraged by creating blame free as
well as a non punitive environment (Makary and Daniel 2016). Therefore, medication errors
can be considered as one of the quality indicators which ensure that the care provided to the
patient is whether safe or not and whether the patient life is at threat or not. This assignment
will help to establish medication error identification and reporting as one of the quality
indicators for help. It will also provide different evaluation Pathways by which medication
errors can be reported and the initiatives that can be taken for every Healthcare centers so that
they can reduce the chances of medication errors and help in development of a safe
environment for the patient to be treated.
Medication error can be defined as any kind of failure in the treatment procedure
which has the potential to affect the lives of patients. On the analysis of different types of
literature that had been research by the eminent authors over the age, different types of
medication errors can be noted. The first type of medication error that might occur is in the

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MEDICATION ERROR AS THE QUALITY INDICATOR
choosing of the correct medicine which might be irrational, inappropriate as well as resulting
from ineffective prescribing, under prescribing or over prescribing. It may also occur during
the time of writing the prescription that may result in prescription errors as which might
include ineligibility (Keers et al. 2015). It also may occur during the time of manufacturing of
the formulation that is to be used by the Healthcare professional. It might have wrong
strength as well as contaminants or adulterants as well as may also have wrong or misleading
packaging. Errors might also occur during dispensing of the formulation that is having the
wrong drug, wrong formulation, wrong label (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering,
and Medicine 2016). It might also occur while administering or taking the drug that may
result from wrong doses, wrong route, wrong frequency as well as wrong duration.
Healthcare professionals can also make errors during monitoring therapy that may result in
failing to alter therapy when required or resulting in erroneous alteration.
In a hospital based study of about 36200 medication errors, prescribing errors were
identified in 1.5% of the cases and most of the errors (for about 54%) were associated with
the choice of drugs that was administered that became potentially severe and harmful for the
patients. This was accounting for about 0.4%. In a survey of about 40000 medication errors in
173 Hospital trusts, it was seen that approximately 15% of this caused slight harm and 5%
caused moderate-to-severe harm. In another study it was found that 1.7% of the prescriptions
dispensed from the community for pharmacies contain errors. Since approximately 3 million
prescriptions are dispensed each year and about 50 million prescriptions contains errors.
Among those, only 0.1% was thought to be clinically important giving an annual incidence of
such errors of about 50000 (Samp et al. 2014). Wrong label information and instructions were
also found to be among the common types of errors. There are harmful impacts on the life of
the patients where the patients have either to live for longer days in the hospital that results in
increased financial burden on them and their families. They also sometimes have to undertake

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MEDICATION ERROR AS THE QUALITY INDICATOR
readmission for the effects of the medication occur much later. This results in anxiety and
fear among these patients along with financial burden. In many of the cases, patients were
seen to suffer immensely before facing death in the hospital which otherwise could have been
prevented if the Healthcare professionals had been careful about their approach. Medication
error has been determined to be one of the most common causes of death in most of the
hospitals and therefore this has become one of the most significant indications for safe
practice in every hospital (Carayon et al. 2014). Researchers are therefore of the opinion that
important evaluative studies should be conducted in every hospitals to understand the
conditions of medication errors occurrences and thereby to stop these occurrences in the
hospitals.
Literature review has been conducted on different types of medication errors. The first
type of medication errors that has been noted in the different evidence-based studies are the
knowledge based error which occurs through the lack of knowledge of the Healthcare
professionals. In an Australian study, communication problem with the senior staff and facing
different kinds of difficulty in accessing appropriate drug dosing information has resulted in
knowledge based prescription errors (Westbrrok et al. 2015). Researchers are of the opinion
that Healthcare professionals should always try to avoid these kind of errors by being well
informed about the drug that is been prescribed and the patient to whom the drug would be
administered (Wachter 2015). For this, computerized prescribing systems as well as barcode
medication systems and even cross checking by others can help to mitigate such kind of
errors. Education is also found to be extremely important to prevent this kind of medication
errors. An example can be provided in order to give idea about knowledge based errors.
Knowledge-based errors might happen when the Healthcare professionals provides penicillin
to a patient even without knowing that the patient is allergic to it or not (Lewis et al. 2016).