Medication Safety in Health Care Settings – Perspective of Pharmacists

Medications play a very important role in the health care delivery system for management of the patients. Medication safety is one of the major components in patient safety but unfortunately medication incidents do occur and often go undetected or unreported. Identifying and addressing the risks of medication use are important aspects of quality of care offered. This study was aimed to describe the socio demographic details of nurses and the knowledge and attitude on medication errors/ incidents among pharmacists in selected hospitals in Sri Lanka. It was a descriptive study carried out by quantitative method using self administered questionnaire. According to the results, 39% of pharmacists were less than 30years and 53.7% had less than 10years experience. 39% had “sometimes” heard the term medication incidents/errors. 56.1% “sometimes” had noted the errors / incidents were reporting and 21.9% had only “rarely” come across for the preventive action taken following the event. 52.6% had noted the minor effects following errors whereas %). 40% of pharmacist had observed 2-5 medication errors/incidents observed on average per month. 97.6% agreed that medication incidents/ or errors could cause significant harm to patients and 97.6% agreed that prefer to have a reporting system in hospitals. As a conclusion pharmacists were observed the medication errors and its harmfulness and they were having the positive attitude towards the establishing the reporting system. Therefore this study is recommended that there were awareness programmes regarding medication incidents/ errors, readiness for reporting if a reporting system is established.