Development of Medication Reconciliation at the Female-medicine ward in Srinagarind Hospital

Abstract

Background and Objective: Adverse drug events can commonly occur in hospitals. Srinagarind hospital, like other hospitals, requires  professional medication reconciliation (MR) process to avoid such mishaps. The objective of this study was to determine the effectiveness of MR process using during the joint procedure in  in-patient system.

Methods: This study is a prospective descriptive study, designed and developed “Medication reconciliation program on IT drug system”. Data was collected at Female Medicine ward, Srinagarind hospital, between May 1^st 2012 to March 31^st 2013 and analyzed by Microsoft excel 2007.

Results: Six hundred and one patients were involved in this study who had been approached 694 times through MR process with 4,623 medicine dosages in total. Medication discrepancies were found in 37.85%. The results showed that unintention discrepancy (which referred as medication errors) occurred in 1.97%. The potiential harm or numbers of patients reported with medication errors were 62 cases (8.93%). In addition, the percentage of  corrected medication errors were 95.60% and prevented 4.40%. Of these, the highest proportions of  medication errors were due to omission error (60.44%) followed by patients used wrong medication (21.98%). After the errors were found, pharmacists consulted doctors and most doctors accepted and aligned themselves with the MR process (89.01%). When classified according to medication errors category, the most errors were in category E (37.36%) which included error occurred that may have contributed to or resulted in temporary harm to the patient and required intervention, followed by category D (32.97%); errors occurred that reached the patient and required monitoring to confirm that is resulted in no harm to the patient and/or required intervention to preclude harm.

Conclusions: Medication reconciliation is an essential processes which can help to aid the safety of medication use in patients in all procedures within different  levels of medication services.