Medication errors in voluntary reported incidents at a Jordanian hospital

Medication incident reports may help organizations to prevent medication errors and to improve patient outcomes. aims: to assess the prevalence,origin,type,and severity of reported medication incidents at jordan university hospital,utilizing a voluntary non-punitive reporting system. materials and methods: the present study is of a retrospective design. all voluntary non-punitive incident reports that occurred between january 2014 to march 2015 at jordan university hospital were retrieved from the quality department of the hospital. detailed content analysis was conducted to obtain all relevant information. data were coded anonymously and analyzed using spss version 20. results: there was an increase in reporting of medication errors overtime and almost all of the reporters were nurses. a total of 58 medication error reports including 86 medications were related to errors in medication management process starting from prescribing,dispensing to administration of medications. two-thirds of those reports originated from the internal medicine department and the neonatal intensive care unit. the most common drug classes associated with those reports were antiinfectives,antivirals,antifungals,cardiovascular medications and chemotherapy agents. the majority of errors occurred during the administration phase where missed doses and wrong time accounted for more than 52%of the reported incidents. around 98.8%of reported incidents did not cause major harm to patients. conclusion: results of this study showed low percent of a broad variety of medication errors in multiple hospital departments. additional research is required to identify possible improvements to optimize reporting and to enhance the response to each report. © 2016 dar publishers / the university of jordan. all rights reserved.