Browsing by Author "Eronen, Anna-Kaisa"

Medication safety meaning the safety of using medication is an important part of patient safety. Medication errors are the most common preventable threats of patient safety. Medication errors can occur in all stages of the medication process. Rather than blaming individuals involved in the process, incidents should be evaluated based on system thinking with an aim of identifying system and process-based weaknesses allowing errors to happen. James Reason's human error theory provides a good framework to investigate the topic from this perspective. The objective of this study was to gather information on the medication errors based on the Patient Insurance Centre 2013-2014 data of compensated medication errors. One of the aims was to identify different types of medication errors and gather information on their backgrounds and drugs involved. Another aim was to investigate the causes behind the medication errors and the views of the people involved on the contributin factors of these errors. Additionally the study aimed at identifying situations where interprofessional collaboration could have prevented medication errors from occurring. Finally the results of the study were also compared with the results of the earlier studies done using similar data. The data of the study consisted of 205 cases where medication error had caused compensated patient injury. Factors behind the errors were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The examples of most common cases were investigated more in depth through simplified root-cause analysis. Content analyses were used to gather information on the views of the people involved in errors as well as on the possibilities of preventing errors through interprofessional collaboration. The most frequent error type was omission of medication. The majority of the errors occurred in the early stages of the process when decisions on medication and treatment were done. There were altogether 250 drugs in the data out of which 98 different active ingredients were identified. Antithrombotic agents were the most common therapeutic group causing medication errors. 37% of all drugs included in data were classified as high alert medicines. More efficient use of the interprofessional collaboration could have prevented several medication errors. The number of medication errors had somewhat increased compared to earlier studies but the profiles of errors were very similar. The data of Patient Insurance Centre provides valuable information on medication errors across Finland. More accurate information on factors leading to medication errors could be obtained by improving voluntary nationwide reporting. This would make it easier to develop operating models that improve patient safety.