Prescription Errors in Health Facilities

Running head: PRESCRIPTION ERRORS IN HEALTH FACILITIES 1
Prescription Errors in Health Facilities
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation

PRESCRIPTION ERRORS IN HEALTH FACILITIES 2
Prescription Errors in Health Facilities
Introduction
Health is the single most important factor in life to most if not all individuals. Health
facilities are set up all around the globe with a view to restore or sustain people’s health. Good
health and improvement in health care can be attributed to the rise in life expectancy in many
parts of the world. Medication plays a major role in the process of restoring the health of
individuals. However, medication errors normally occur in most health care facilities with
prescription errors being one of the most significant contributor to these errors. As such, the
health of individuals is put at risk with a potential of causing harm to patients or loss of life.
The problem of making errors while prescribing drugs to patients is a safety one as it
directly affects patients’ health. For this reason, this paper seeks to present a research on some of
the major causes of such errors and their impacts on patients and medical practitioners. The
author is a nursing student whose specialty area is the Epilepsy ward. As such, prescription
errors should be avoided at all costs since epileptic patients depend on medication to control
seizures and other effects of epilepsy. Consequently, responsibilities within NMBA standards
that nurses need to undertake in order to reduce the number of prescription errors occurrences
will be made.
Medication Errors – Prescription Errors
An Equip Study carried out in English speaking health facilities revealed that close to
10% errors made during prescription. Out of all the errors made during the time of the study, it
was found out that junior medical practitioners made twice as much mistakes in drug
prescriptions as their senior counterparts (Dorman, Ashcroft, & Heathfield, 2012). Another study

PRESCRIPTION ERRORS IN HEALTH FACILITIES 3
conducted in 2014 in Scotland medical facilities sought to find the prevalence of medication
errors particularly in prescription by junior doctors (Ryan, Ross, & Davey, 2014). In this study,
the junior doctors were taken to be those in their first or second year of practice after their
graduate studies. The results had a shocking revelation that medication errors accounted about
24% of the total errors with prescription errors making a significant contribution. It was also
determined that most of the errors took place when the patients were being admitted. These
would then escalate to other departments that led to further errors.
In most of the studies carried out, interviews and questionnaires were issued to collect
data on the reasons behind the errors made. During one such study, unfavourable working
environment was brought up by most medical practitioners who were interviewed. Factors such
as high workloads and a lot of pressure in terms of limited amount of time were mentioned under
unfavourable working conditions. Interruptions during administration of drugs were also cited as
some of the major causes of the errors made. In addition to working environments, inadequate
data on drugs was cited as a major factor in causing errors while administering drugs to patients.
The inadequate data then resulted in lack of familiarity with the medication which made the
health professionals make the errors during prescription (Duerden, Avery, & Payne, 2013). The
third factor was related to work mates/ teams. Under this factor, lack of proper channels of
sharing information between team members led to prescription errors by those who carried out
this task.
Based on findings from multiple studies across the world, the causes of errors in
medication, prescription errors included, could be classified into seven classes. One, errors as a
direct result of the medical personnel (Lisby, Nielsen, & Brock, 2010). These types of errors
result from inadequate training among practitioners, poor knowledge and experience in drug