Medication errors are a serious problem, causing between 44,000 and 98,000 deaths in the US each year at a cost of over $140 billion. They can damage patient trust in the healthcare system and reduce adherence to treatment. Common causes of errors include communication problems, look-alike and sound-alike drug names, poor handwriting, inadequate training, and system failures. To reduce errors, healthcare professionals must ensure the right patient receives the correct drug, dose, route, duration, and instructions. Special attention should be paid to labeling, storage, and disposal.

1. Medication with no harm
Laith Alasadi

2. Medication errors
• The definition of medication error is ". .. any
preventable event that may cause or lead to
inappropriate medication use or patient harm.

3. medication errors
• What would happen if air plain Boeing 747
jetliners crashed each year?
•
• So, If 100 Boeing was crashed (about 40,000 lives
lost)?. Terrible and unimaginable! Yes, but
between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans lose their
lives to medication errors each year.
• The annual cost of medication errors in the
United States has been estimated to be more
than $140 billion.

4. Medication errors
• Medication errors have another burden rather
than potential harm to patients, it lead to reduce
patient confidence in the health care system.
• The information provided by health care
providers to patient became not trusted.
• As a result, the patient adherence will be
deteriorated and may make the patient try to
used alternative therapies.

5. Causes of medication errors
1- communication problems
• Distractions and noise that interfere with clear
transmission and receipt of the message.
• Speaking too rapidly for the listener to clearly
comprehend
• Numbers that sound alike (5 vs. 50)

6. Causes of medication errors
2- look-alike sound alike ( LASA)
when medications have similar-looking or
similar-sounding names, and/or shared features
of product packaging.
EX. Zentac and Zertec
• Tall man lettering can solve this problem.

7. Causes of medication errors
3- Poor hand writing

8. Causes of medication errors
4- Poor training
5- system failure
6- polypharmacy
7- low patient education
8- social and cultural habits

9. Medication use process
• To ensure correct and appropriate using of
medication, we have to check the following:
1- the right patient
Patient may have similar names or descriptions
So, as a professional pharmacist must be sure of
targeted patient.

10. Medication use process
2- right medicines
• Medicines may be prescribed incorrectly to
patient or he is given medicines rather than
prescribed
• Therefore, the pharmacist must check the
medicines before dispensing and patient
administration.

11. Medication use process
3- The right dose
• You must confirm the dose of the prescribed
medicines before dispensing.
• This task is more confirmed when dealing with
some patient such as children and infants, elderly,
immune compromised, with renal failure….. Etc
• The dose must be calculated and titrated for
antibiotics, narrow therapeutics window, drug
with sever withdrawal symptoms, infants and
hazardous drugs.

12. Medication use process
4- The right rout
Each medication has been formulated as dosage
form suitable for administered in one of
administration rout.
Many mistake has been occurred, for instance
- Swallowing vaginal tablets
- Administering IM injection intravenously
- Dropping ear drop in the eyes

13. Medication use process
5- the right duration
• The duration of treatment varied depending
on types of drug, disease and patient.
• The duration ranged from single dose to few
days reaching to continues using along life.

14. 6- The right labeling
Evidences are available for best practices in labeling
format and content including
• increasing font size
• using clear and simple language
• using headers
• placing a more appropriate emphasis on
organizing label content around what is most
important for patients such as drug name, dose,
dosage or usage instructions, patient name,
doctor name, quantity, refill information, and
provider content such as pharmacy name, logo
and national drug code number should be in
optimal font size

15. 7- the right storage, distribution and disposal
• Some drug have special instruction regarding storage
consideration.
• The pharmacist must differentiate in storage between
the following degree :
Room temperature
Cool area
Cold area
Deep freeze
Liquid nitrogen

16. Thank you