The tip of the iceberg: The method which notifies medication errors inside a private hospital in the city of Campinas-SP. / "A ponta do iceberg: o método de notificação de erros de medicação em um hospital geral privado no município de Campinas-SP"

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2006

RESUMO

Observations made within nursing practice indicate that errors in the ministering of medicaments are liable to occur and in fact they do. As causes, amongst others, there is the workload of the nursing team, the insufficient knowledge of medicaments, the large number of medicaments launched in the market each year, the quality of medical prescriptions, ultimately, failure in the medication system in a general manner. One way to lower medication errors is to notify them, which leads to the study of the causes and enables their prevention. In this way, this study was developed with the following objectives: to describe and analyze the notified medication errors in a General Private Hospital in the city of Campinas-SP and the incident report used by the institution and propose a report on medication errors. This deals with a longitudinal and retrospective study which is exploratory, descriptive and divided into two fases: in the first an analysis of the medication errors was performed and in the second an interview with the professionals. In the period of January 1999 to December 2005, 39 medication errors were analyzed, whereby 13 (33,3%) were related to the ministering of non-prescribed medication and 10 (25,6%) were related to errors of omission. The interview was performed with 64 professionals and of these, 45 (70,3%) did not know about the incident report used at the institution. Of the 19 (29,7%) professional who did know about the report, all considered it to be adequate for reporting medication errors. In addition to this, 30 (46,9%) professionals believe that medication errors are notified to the institution. However with the low number of errors notified in the period of 6 years, it is clear that the true picture at the institution is quite different. Due to this, a model of Error Notification Report, that was structured according to data from literature and from governmental organs and institutions, was proposed. It is concluded that the professionals of this institution have no knowledge of the present situation, which occurs inside their institution. Also, the institution’s incident report is incomplete, needs to be revised and disclosed within the institution in order to involve the entire multi-disciplinary team, increase the number of errors reported, thereby implementing action strategies to avoid new errors and consequently increase the safety of patients and the quality of the rendered assistance.

ASSUNTO(S)

erros de medicação medication errors notificação de erros patient safety segurança do paciente error reporting

ACESSO AO ARTIGO

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