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Background: Medication errors regardless of the degree of patient harm can have a negative emotional impact on the healthcare staff involved. The potential for self-victimization of healthcare staff following medication errors can add to the moral distress of healthcare staff. The stigma associated with errors and their disclosure often haunts healthcare professionals, leading them to question their own professional competence. This paper investigates the negative emotions expressed by healthcare staff in their reported medication administration error incidents along with the immediate responses they received from their seniors and colleagues after the incident.Method: This is a retrospective study using a qualitative descriptive design and text mining. This study includes free-text descriptions of medication administration error incidents (n = 72,390) reported to National Reporting & Learning System in 2016 from England and Wales. Text-mining by SAS text miner and content analysis was used to analyse the data.Results: Analysis of data led to the extraction of 93 initial codes and two categories i.e., 1) negative emotions expressed by healthcare staff which included 4 sub-categories of feelings: (i) fear; (ii) disturbed; (iii) sadness; (iv) guilt and 2) Immediate response from seniors and colleagues which included 2 sub-categories: (i) Reassurance and support and (ii) Guidance on what to do after an error.Conclusion: Negative emotions expressed by healthcare staff when reporting medication errors could be a catalyst for learning and system change. However, negative emotions when internalized as fear, guilt, or self-blame, could have a negative impact on the mental health of individuals concerned, reporting culture, and opportunities for learning from the error. Findings from this study, hence, call for future research to investigate the impact of negative emotions on healthcare staff well-being and identify ways to mitigate these in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: (a) To describe trigger terms that can be used to identify reports of inadequate staffing contributing to medication administration errors, (b) to identify such reports, (c) to compare the degree of harm within incidents with and without those triggers, and (d) to examine the association between the most commonly reported inadequate staffing trigger terms and the incidence of omission errors and "no harm" terms. Design and Setting: This was a retrospective study using descriptive statistical analysis, text mining, and manual analysis of free text descriptions of medication administration–related incident reports (N = 72,390) reported to the National Reporting and Learning System for England and Wales in 2016. Methods: Analysis included identifying terms indicating inadequate staffing (manual analysis), followed by text parsing, filtering, and concept linking (SAS Text Miner tool). IBM SPSS was used to describe the data, compare degree of harm for incidents with and without triggers, and to compare incidence of "omission errors" and "no harm" among the inadequate staffing trigger terms. Findings: The most effective trigger terms for identifying inadequate staffing were "short staffing" (n = 81), "workload" (n = 80), and "extremely busy" (n = 51). There was significant variation in omission errors across inadequate staffing trigger terms (Fisher's exact test = 44.11, p <.001), with those related to "workload" most likely to accompany a report of an omission, followed by terms that mention "staffing" and being "busy." Prevalence of "no harm" did not vary statistically between the trigger terms (Fisher's exact test = 11.45, p = 0.49), but the triggers "workload," "staffing level," "busy night," and "busy unit" identified incidents with lower levels of "no harm" than for incidents overall. Conclusions: Inadequate staffing levels, workload, and working in haste may increase the risk for omissions and other types of error, as well as for patient harm. Clinical Relevance: This work lays the groundwork for creating automated text‐analytical systems that could analyze incident reports in real time and flag or monitor staffing levels and related medication administration errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Medication administration errors may contribute to patient mortality, thus additional understanding of such incidents is required., Objectives: To analyse medication administration errors reported in acute care resulting in death, to identify the drugs concerned, and to describe medication administration error characteristics (location of error, error type, patient's age) by drug group., Methods: Medication administration errors reported in acute care in 2007 ̶ 2016 (n = 517,384) were obtained from the National Reporting and Learning System for England and Wales. Incidents reported as resulting in death (n = 229) were analysed. Drugs were classified by two researchers using the British National Formulary. Drug categories were described by medication administration errors' year, location, patient age, and error category based on the incidents' original classification., Results: Errors were most often reported on wards (66.4%, n = 152), and in patients aged over 75 years (41.5%, n = 95). The most common error category was omitted medicine or ingredient (31.4%, n = 72); most common drug groups were cardiovascular (20.1%, n = 46) and nervous system (10.0%, n = 23). Most errors in patients under 12 years concerned drugs to treat infection; cardiovascular drugs were most common among other age groups., Conclusions: In order to prevent these most serious of medication administration errors, interventions should focus on avoiding dose omissions, and administration of drugs for patients over 75 years old, as well as safe administration of parenteral anticoagulants and antibacterial drugs., (Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)