What is it about?
One of the important activities that physicians – particularly general practitioners perform is prescribing. It occurs in most health care facilities and especially in primary health care (PHC) settings. This study aims to determine what types of prescribing errors are made in primary care at Bahrain BDF hospital ,and how common they are.
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Why is it important?
Our study showed Of the total prescriptions, 54.4% were given to male patients and 45.6% to female patients; 24.8% were given to patients under the age of 10 years. On average, there were 2.6 drugs per prescription. In the prescriptions, 8.7% of drugs were prescribed by their generic names, and 28% of prescriptions included an antibiotic. Out of the 379 prescriptions, 228 had an error, and 44.3% of the 992 prescribed drugs contained errors. The proportions of errors were as follows: 9.9% were minor omission errors;73.6% were major omission errors; 9.3% were commission errors; and 17.1% were skill-related errors.
Perspectives
This study provides awareness of the presence of prescription errors and frequency of the different types of errors that exist in this hospital. Understanding the different types of errors could help future studies explore the causes of specific errors and develop interventions to reduce them. Further research should be conducted to understand the causes of these errors and demonstrate whether the introduction of electronic prescriptions has an effect on patient outcomes.
Fatema Aljasmi
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Prevalence of medication errors in primary health care at Bahrain Defence Force Hospital – prescription-based study, Drug Healthcare and Patient Safety, February 2018, Dove Medical Press,
DOI: 10.2147/dhps.s147994.
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