(P-553) Pharmacists Role in Patient Safety: Evaluation of Dispensing Errors in a Regional Hospital

Background: Patient safety, understood as reducing the risk of unnecessary harm associated with care, has been considered a priority attribute of the quality of health systems worldwide. In the hospital environment, the medication process is highly complex and can generate circumstances that lead to errors, which in turn, can cause permanent or lethal harm to patients. Understanding the processes of medicines use in hospitals and the determinants of medication errors are essential strategies to mitigate risks.

Objectives: To analyze the medication dispensing errors identified by the pharmacy of a regional hospital.

Methods: This is a cross-sectional study carried out in a medium-sized regional hospital in the state of Minas Gerais / Brazil, from July 2019 to June 2020. Dispensing error was defined as a discrepancy between a prescription and the medicines delivered by pharmacy to the patient or distributed to the ward on the basis of this prescription. Data were collected at the time of drug dispensing, and immediately recorded in a Microsoft Excel® spreadsheet. The checking of all dispensations is a routine adopted by the pharmacy where the study was carried out, aiming to increase patient safety. Dispensing errors were classified considering the list of standardized drugs and current hospital dispensing rules during the study period.

Results: Of the 19,655 prescriptions included in the study period, 380 dispensing errors were identified, an error rate of 1.9%. The period from September 2019 to February 2020 presented the highest rates (3.6% per month). A high prevalence of errors was identified in women (165; 53.4%) compared to men (144, 46.6%). Analyzing by age group, errors were more prevalent is in the elderly aged 65 years or older (140; 36.9%) whith 380 dispensing errors identified. The most prevalent dispensing errors were dose omission and / or medication omission (165, 42.8%). 101 different drugs were recorded with dispensing errors. Regarding therapeutic groups, antibacterial for systemic use (38, 12.6%), blood substitutes and perfusion solutions (37, 12.3%) and antithrombotic (34, 11.3%) were the main pharmacological groups involved in errors. Considering the hospital sector, general medicine prescription had the highest rate of dispensing errors (115; 30.3%).

Conclusions: Dispensing errors are still frequent in the hospital environment and may indicate quality deviations in the service provided by the pharmacy. It is the responsibility of the pharmacist to minimize them, based on the implementation of barriers and actions that lead to the reduction of the occurrence of flaws in the medication system, in order to ensure patient safety throughout the healthcare process.