Quality of Health Care Improved by Stationing Pharmacists in Wards

There are many types of medication error,which include those relating to dosage,wrong medication given to patients,administration route,medication strength,falls and patient care.In order to reduce medication errors,we analyzed 1601 errors reported at Tokyo Teishin Hospital over a period of one year.As the most frequent medication errors were made by nurses,we analyzed the medication-related tasks conducted by nurses in all 12 wards of our hospital.Medication-related tasks took up an average of 13.5 hours of their working time,which accounted for 15% of total working hours,and most of these them were conducted in the daytime.As for the major tasks,giving drugs to patients took up 26.7% of the time,instructing patients regarding compliance 20.7% and making arrangements for the administration of drugs to patients 26.6 % (non-injection drugs 16.3%,injections 10.3%).In order to prevent such medication-related errors,from 7 : 30 to 19 : 30,pharmacists performed all medication-related tasks instead of the nurses.We were able to prevent 26 instances of medication-related errors due to physicians in a period of month.These errors primarily concerned the continuation and/or discontinuation of drugs,protocol errors and medication given in error.Our findings suggested that it would be difficult to prevent them by only examining prescriptions in the dispensing room and concluded that errors could be more effectively prevented by having all medication-related tasks in wards performed by pharmacists.