A Survey of Nursing Staff’s Perspective Regarding Reasons for Medication Errors

Background: Health care services are associated with risks for their recipients. Medication errors can lead to many negative consequences for the health care system, including prolonged hospital stay and increased cost per patient. The aim of this study was to investigate the nursing staff’s perspective regarding reasons for medication errors in Ayatollah Kashani hospital, Shahrekord, Iran. Methods: 207 nurses working in the ICUs of the hospital were selected by convenience sampling and their comments about effective factors in the incidence of medication errors were investigated by a researcher-made questionnaire. To examine the reliability and validity of the questionnaire, we offered it to 5 nursing experts and necessary corrections were made based on the comments. The reliability of the questionnaire was also investigated by Cronbach’s alpha coefficient that gave the value of 85%. The first section of the questionnaire consisted of questions about demographic characteristics and the second section investigated the reasons for medication errors in nursing-related area, workplace-related area, director of nursing-related area, and drug-related area. For each item, there were four choices, i.e. none, little, moderate, and much and therefore, the level of importance scored between 0 and 3. The data were analyzed by SPSS 17. Results: In this study, the most important reasons for medication errors were related to workload-induced fatigue (mean: 2.37) in the nurses-related area, high labor-intensity in department (mean: 2.32) in the workplace-related area, insufficient nursing staff proportional to the number of patients in department (mean: 2.41) in the director of nursing-related area, and drug name confusion in the drug-related area (mean: 2.04). Conclusions: The officials of health care systems should focus on the effective processes in reducing medication errors including appropriate training of the staff and holding in-service training sessions about drug information as well as appropriate planning for employment of adequate workforce.