Ranking of the Causes of Medication Errors in the Viewpoints of Nurses in Selected Hospitals Affiliated With Yazd University of Medical Sciences, Iran

The occurrence of drug mistakes leads to serious health problems and threatens patient safety. It increases the mortality rates and hospital costs. The purpose of this study was rankings the Causes of Medication Errors from the viewpoints of Nurses in selected Hospitals Affiliated With Yazd University of Medical Sciences in 2016.
A cross-sectional study was conducted on 220 nurses working in educational hospitals affiliated to Yazd University of Medical Sciences (Shahid Sadoughi, Shahid Rahnemoon and Afshar Hospitals). Stratified random sampling was used. Required data was gathered by Gladstone questionnaire. Data analysis was done through SPSS 16.
The most common causes of medication errors were the failure to match the patient's names with ordered drugs, the ill-considered and unreadable nature of the physician's orders and the nominal similarity of drugs. Failure to match the patient's names with ordered drugs (3.45 ± 2.85) and the incorrect setting of the infusion device by the nurse (8.81 ± 2.57) had the highest and lowest scores from the viewpoints of nurses.
Establishing and implementing electronic drug prescription, in service training for improving nurse's pharmacological knowledge, identifying the main types and causes of drug errors, the teaching of proper prescribing techniques are needed.