Nursing Medication Errors: Causes and solutions - A review study

Patient safety is key to the trust in any health care system nowadays. Medication errors, as a key safety threatening factors, could increase patients’ length of stay and healthcare costs in hospitals and might lead into injury and finally death. Therefore, this study seeks to compare the incidence and proposed solutions of Iran and selected countries in order for preventing medication errors. This is a review article searching in such databases as SID, IranMedex, Pubmed, Scopous to identify and select its related papers. At last, 24 studies were considered for this study. According to the results of studies, shortage of nurses, nurses’ inexperience, job stress, physicians’ handwriting and lack of information on medications were the highly frequent incidence causes. Training courses on medicine dispensing and hands-on training were the most important solution. Given the existing gap between the medication errors incidence rate of Iran and selected countries, the latter’s experiences such as transparency and responsibility and active role of hospital pharmacies could be utilized by the former.