Medication Errors Experiences of Nurses who Working in Hospitals of Isfahan at 1391

Patient safety has long been a major concern for healthcare professionals. Today، hospitals should provide patient safety in order to gain accreditation. Among patient safety issues، medication error rate has been considered as a major indicator of healthcare quality. The different aspects of medication error are not clearly known and the nurses are the main source of knowledge in this field. Therefore، the researcher decided to study the experiences of nurses who have been faced with a medication error in order to clarify the various aspects of this phenomenon. It is through the exact identification of this phenomenon that it can be managed.

In the present study، a phenomenological qualitative approach was used. Participants in this study were nurses working in hospitals of Isfahan and had experienced medication error. Purposive sampling was adopted in the study and sample size was dependent on the data saturation. A total of 10 participants were chosen. Data collection was carried out through unstructured interviews and analysis through Colaizzi’s Method.

From the findings of this study، six main themes expressing participants’ experiences emerged. The six main themes include: The context of error، the error range، negligence، the consequence of error، concealment of error، and reporting of error.

Nurses report their errors when they feel safe and do not see harmful results for them. Therefore، hospitals should review their policies on error reporting to ensure they actively encourage nurses to report medication errors، and to support a blame-free culture in the organization and a systembased approach to deal with the error.