International journal for quality in health care : journal of the International Society for Quality in Health Care
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Int J Qual Health Care · Feb 2015
Comparative StudyWhat are incident reports telling us? A comparative study at two Australian hospitals of medication errors identified at audit, detected by staff and reported to an incident system.
To (i) compare medication errors identified at audit and observation with medication incident reports; (ii) identify differences between two hospitals in incident report frequency and medication error rates; (iii) identify prescribing error detection rates by staff. ⋯ Prescribing errors with the potential to cause harm frequently go undetected. Reported incidents do not reflect the profile of medication errors which occur in hospitals or the underlying rates. This demonstrates the inaccuracy of using incident frequency to compare patient risk or quality performance within or across hospitals. New approaches including data mining of electronic clinical information systems are required to support more effective medication error detection and mitigation.