Incidence and types of dispensing errors in the pharmacy of a tertiary care charitable hospital

Introduction: Dispensing errors challenge the patient safety and may induce unwanted and noxious events. The objective of this study was to estimate the incidence and types of dispensing errors in the pharmacy of a tertiary care charitable hospital. Materials and methods: This was a prospective observational study conducted for a period of 15 months in the patient counseling area of a 1000 bed hospital. A suitable data collection tool was developed and was approved by the research advisory committee. The required data were obtained randomly from 1852 patients visiting the hospital's pharmacy. The collected data were analyzed for incidence and types of dispensing errors using SPSS (version 20.0). Results: A total of 5353 drugs were dispensed on 1852 prescriptions. The average number of drugs per prescription was found to be three (2.89). The maximum number of drugs prescribed in a prescription was twelve and the minimum was one. Pantoprazole was the most frequently prescribed drug (n = 633, 34.18%). A total of 26 dispensing errors were identified in 21 prescriptions, accounting for a rate of 1.40%. Out of the total errors identified, wrong dose was found to be the most common type of dispensing error accounting for (n = 8, 30.76%), followed by incorrect labeling and wrong quantity (n = 4, 15.38% each). Conclusion: The incidence of dispensing errors was 1.4% and most of the errors were related to the dose/strength of the dispensed drugs.