Community Health Journal

Community Health Journal

Type and Rate of Medication Errors and their Causes from the Perspectives of Neonatal and Neonatal Intensive Care Units Nurses in Yazd Hospitals, 2014

Authors
T Ramazani 1
SM Hosseini Almadvari 2
H Fallahzadeh 3
A Dehghani Tafti 4
1 PhD. Candidate of Nursing, Faculty Member of Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Razi school of Nursing & Midwifery, Department of Public Health. Kerman, Iran.
2 MSc, Student of Neonatal Intensive care Nursing, Razi school of Nursing &Midwifery , Kerman University of Medical Sciences. Kerman, Iran
3 Professor of Biostatistics, Dept. of Statistics & Epidemiology, Yazd shahid Sadughi university of Medical Sciences, School of Health. Yazd, Iran
4 MSc. in Biostatistics, Faculty Member of Yazd shahid Sadughi university of Medical Sciences, School of Health. Yazd, Iran
Abstract
Introduction: Medication and medication errors are very important in children, especially in neonates. This study is aimed to determine the level and the type of medication errors and their causes of Working Nurses’ Perspectives in Neonatal Units and Neonatal Intensive Care Units.

Material and Methods: The present research was a descriptive cross-sectional study. The method of sampling was census and included 180 nurses working in the neonatal units and neonatal intensive care units in 10 hospitals of Yazd. The data collection tool was questionnaire. The first questionnaire contained the demographic data. The second questionnaire was “Medication Administration Error” in order to determine the level and types of medication errors). The collected data were entered into the SPSS statistical software (v. 20) and analyzed using descriptive statistics (frequency, mean, and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (t-test, and Pearson correlation statistics).

Results: twenty percent of the nurses indicated that during the last 6 months they did not commit medication errors and 45% had between 1 to 2 medication errors. Medication errors in injection drugs respectively included; errors in the time of administration of medication (51% to 60%), errors in pharmaceutical calculations (51% to 60%), wrong dose of a drug (41% to 50%) and medication errors in non-injection medications included in medication calculations (51% to 60%) and after that errors in medication dose (41% to 50%). Correlation between injection and non-injection medication showed that errors occur mostly in the injection drugs .The most important causes of medication errors were lack of adequate resources.

Conclusion: Since the risk of medication errors among nurses are high, retaining courses on pharmacological information, modification of educational curriculum, encouraging nurses to report medical errors and also encouraging hospital managers to give positive response to errors are suggested.
Keywords
medication errors
Neonatal Unit
Neonatal Intensive Care Unit
Nursing Viewpoint
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