Medication time out as a strategy for patient safety: reducing medication errors.

OBJECTIVES to analyze the implementation of the medication time out strategy to reduce medication errors. METHODS this is a quantitative, cross-sectional, inferential study, with direct observation of the implementation of the medication time out strategy, carried out in a cardiac intensive care unit of a university hospital in Rio de Janeiro. RESULTS 234 prescriptions with 2,799 medications were observed. Of the prescriptions analyzed, 143 (61%) had at least one change with the use of the strategy. In the prescriptions altered, 290 medications had some type of change, and 104 (35.9%) changes were related to potentially harmful medication. During the application of the strategy, prescriptions with polypharmacy had 1.8 times greater chance of presenting an error (p-value = 0.031), which reinforces the importance of the strategy for prescriptions with multiple medications. CONCLUSIONS the implementation of the medication time out strategy contributed to the interception of a high number of medication errors, using few human and material resources.