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Objectives: Failure mode effect analysis (FMEA) improves safety in the drug life cycle. As the drug dispensation by hospital's pharmacy can be at risk, the FMEA tool has been used to evaluate and enhance the process., Methods: After detailing the process, a first FMEA has been run in 2015. Corrective actions were implemented every time criticality indexes (CI) were above 15. One year later, we have evaluated potential impacts of these actions by running a new FMEA., Results: In 2015, 11 failure modes were prioritized (CI>15) and the total CI for the overall process was 397. Corrective actions were implemented and one year later this amount has decreased by 14% (340) with 6 failure modes still prioritized. Thus, thanks to the FMEA, risks could be identified in year "y", they were taken into account and corrected and then effectively reassessed in year "y+1"., Conclusion: This study showed us the interest of performing FMEA analysis in the drug dispensation process by hospital. The renewal of this risk analysis after a year helped us to monitor corrective actions, to evaluate their effectiveness and to improve safety. Finally, FMEA seems to be an effective way to steer the drug dispensation process., (Copyright © 2019 Académie Nationale de Pharmacie. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.)

Background and Objective: Many dispensing errors occur in hospital pharmacies and can harm patients if they are not intercepted. The aim of this study was to determine the incidence and the primary types of medication dispensing errors at a French military hospital., Method: The check of unit dose medication cassettes was performed by nurses. From February 2007 to April 2007, detected dispensing errors were systematically recorded and classified into 6 categories: unauthorized drug, wrong dosage-form, improper dose, omission, wrong time, and deteriorated drug errors. The overall error rate was calculated., Results: During the study, 5112 medication cassettes were checked. 106 dispensing errors have been detected by nurses for a total of 45,573 filled (n=45,518) and omitted (n=55) unit doses. An overall error rate of 0.23% was found. There were approximately 0.02 detected dispensing errors per medication cassette. The most common error types were omission errors (n=55, 51.88%) and improper dose errors (n=30, 28.30%)., Discussion-Conclusion: The results of this study showed that a check performed by nurses after the dispensing process is necessary to detect the dispensing errors. Many causes may explain the occurrence of dispensing errors and must be corrected. Because some dispensing errors may remain undetected, there is a requirement to develop strategies in order to reduce or eliminate these errors, such as the implementation of a computerized prescribing system. The pharmacy staff is widely involved in this duty.