Effect of strategies for preventing medication administration errors in pediatric inpatients

Aim: Pediatrics is a population at high risk for medication errors. The risk and effect of errors related to the physiological characteristics of children, medications that are prepared in small doses and the absence of the pediatric form of the many drugs. This study was conducted to examine the effect of prevention strategies in pediatric medication administration errors. Material and Method: This research has used the undisquised observation method in data collected. Medication doses were observed in pre-intervention phase (1686 doses) and post-intervention phase (1460 doses). Prevention strategies were applied for error contributing factors. Pre-post intervention data were evaluated by chi-square. Necessary permissions were obtained from the ethical committee of the hospital (B.30.2..0.70.10.00-3435) and the nursing school (B.30.2..0.82.00.00/1407), where the study was conducted. Nurses were informed about the objective and method of the study, their questions were answered and consents were taken. Results: Medication administration errors rate was 28.2 % in pre-intervention phase. Medication administration errors rate was 21.4 % in post intervention. The most frequent errors were wrong time and wrong dose errors. In the observations, it was determined that the inadequacy of medication preparation and administration protocols, workload and equipment inadequacies contributed to error. Conclusions: The results of this study support that medication errors are a universal problem according to that our results are similar with the results of international studies. The outcomes of the study declare that medication administration errors are multifactorial and it has vital importance to understand the latent conditions of errors. The results obtained in our study point to importance of systematic approach to prevention of medication errors.