Profiling harmful medication errors in an acute Irish teaching hospital.

Background Medication error reporting systems in hospitals are faced with the challenge of processing vast numbers of reports which identify a myriad of safety issues. With such large volumes of data and limited resources it makes sense to adopt a prioritisation approach. Several published studies have focused solely on the subset of errors which cause patient harm. The majority of such research has concerned the individual analysis of criteria associated with medication errors. However, the research described here used an alternative approach which involved linking the three criteria of medication class, patient outcome, and type of error, in order to describe the medication-related scenarios presenting greatest risk to the organisation.