Improving the quality of medical prescriptions in neonatal units.
BACKGROUND
Pediatric units, especially neonatal units, are highly vulnerable to error generally and to medication error in particular. Potential failures are distributed across the entire medication process, occurring mostly at the time of medication prescription and during preparation for drug administration.


OBJECTIVE
To estimate the prevalence of violations of good prescribing practice before and after the implementation of several measures aimed at improving the quality of the medical prescription.


METHODS
Before and after evaluation study with prospective data collection in a third level neonatal unit. 6,320 handwritten medical prescriptions for neonates admitted in the first study period and 1,435 in the second period were analyzed. Training on good prescribing practice and the implementation of a pocket PC-based automatic dosage calculation system were the interventions. The main outcome measure was the proportion of prescriptions with violations of good prescribing practice: incorrect dose, units, dose interval, route of administration or legibility.


RESULTS
Incorrect prescriptions decreased from 39.5% before the intervention to 11.9% after, with an adjusted prevalence ratio of 0.29 (0.25-0.34). The number of wrongly specified items on a single prescription decreased from 11.1% of the prescriptions with two or more wrongly specified items in the first period to 1.3% in the second period, with a prevalence ratio of 0.09 (0.05-0.14).


CONCLUSIONS
Violations of good prescribing practice are common in neonatal units. A simple intervention should improve the quality of handwritten medical prescriptions for newborns admitted to intensive care settings.
Pallás
Carmen R
CR
Neonatal Unit, Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre, Madrid, Spain. jakeka1@movistar.net
De-la-Cruz
Javier
J
Del-Moral
M Teresa
MT
Lora
David
D
Malalana
M Ana
MA
D011307:Drug Prescriptions / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D007363:Intensive Care Units, Neonatal; D008508:Medication Errors / Q000517:prevention & control*; D010607:Pharmacy Service, Hospital / Q000592:standards*; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care / Q000379:methods; D011787:Quality of Health Care