Essay On Prescribing Medication Errors

The process of prescribing medication is complex and involves many individuals seamlessly collaborating together in order for the process to flow smoothly. The prescribing process has numerous areas which can cause errors to providing the patient with the correct prescription. There are four main parties responsible for prescription errors: the physician, the pharmacist, the nurse, or the patient. A breakdown between any of these individuals could lead to a medication error. The Division of Medication Error Prevention and Analysis (DMEPA) defines a medication error as, “any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while the medication is in control of the health care professional, patient,

Like the previous step, this step also has many possibilities for errors. The first of these can occur if the prescription is unclear or illegible. Unreadable handwriting can make it very difficult for a pharmacist to determine which medication and dosage was actually prescribed by physician, and leaves a variety of outcomes in regards to the medication that the patient will receive. Another possible error would be the pharmacist inadvertently choosing the incorrect medication when filling the prescription. Or to further complicate things, the pharmacist could mix up the prescriptions and swap the medications provided to patients, putting the medication for patient “A” in the bottle for patient “B” and vice versa. This would be twice as bad due to the error effecting two patients instead of just one. If this wasn’t bad enough, yet another error that can occur would be the pharmacist mislabeling the bottle that the medication is put into. These medication bottles are labelled with the medication and dosage information, as well as the patient’s information. Therefore, any error in this label could provide either: the incorrect medication, the incorrect dosage, or dispense the medication to the incorrect