Perception of Nurses on Medication Errors / Incidents in Selected Hospitals in Sri Lanka

Medication safety is one of the major components in patient safety. Medication incidents are defined as any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while the medication is in the control of the healthcare professional, patient, or consumer. But Sri Lanka does not have a proper reporting system for medication incident reporting. This study was aimed to describe the socio demographic details of nurses and the knowledge and attitude on medication errors/ incidents among nurses in selected hospitals in Sri Lanka. This was a descriptive study carried out as a health system research with basic survey with quantitative methods among 249 nurses in 4 tertiary care hospitals, Sri Lanka. According the results, 38.2% of the nurses were less than 30yrs of age and 48.6% were less than 10 years of working experience. 39.8% nurses who were rarely heard the term medication incident/errors during their service period and 37.8% had sometimes come across for the preventive action taken following the event. 34.2% had rarely noted the reporting the incidents/ errors. 82.7% of nurses had agreed on that staff would report medication incidents, if a system is established. As a conclusion, it was identified that there is no proper reporting mechanism. Therefore this study recommended that there were awareness regarding medication incidents/ errors, readiness for reporting if a reporting system is establish a mechanism for reporting the incidents /errors.