A Focus on Medication Error

A medication error is any avoidable adverse incident that happens due to negligence or incorrect administration of the medication to the patients that lead to an erroneous or imperfect diagnosis of a disease, injury, syndrome, behaviour, infection or other illness. The cause of medication error can be associated to healthcare professionals’ careless practice, outdated health care products, improper follow-ups of the procedures and systems. There are various factors involved that promote such events to happen, for example, an error in dosage or route of administration, incorrect prescription, problem in reading handwritten prescription, failure to administer the correct formulation for a particular disease, use of expired drugs, incorrect timing for administration of the drug, lack of awareness of adverse effects of certain drug combinations, shortage of information about a patient's drug allergies or sensitivities, problem with product labelling, packaging, compounding, dispensing, distribution, monitoring, administration and nomenclature, that is, confusion about different drugs with similar names.