title: A 3-year study of medication incidents in an acute general hospital.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Inappropriate medication use may harm patients. We analysed medication incident reports (MIRs) as part of the feedback loop for quality assurance.
  
  
  METHODS
  From all MIRs in a university-affiliated acute general hospital in Hong Kong in the period January 2004-December 2006, we analysed the time, nature, source and severity of medication errors.
  
  
  RESULTS
  There were 1278 MIRs with 36 (range 15-107) MIRs per month on average. The number of MIRs fell from 649 in 2004, to 353 in 2005, and to 276 in 2006. The most common type was wrong strength/dosage (36.5%), followed by wrong drug (16.7%), wrong frequency (7.7%), wrong formulation (7.0%), wrong patient (6.9%) and wrong instruction (3.1%). 60.9%, 53.7% and 84.0% of MIRs arose from handwritten prescription (HP) rather than the computerized medication order entry in 2004, 2005 and 2006 respectively. In 43.1% of MIRs, preregistration house officers were involved. Most errors (80.2%) were detected before any drug was wrongly administered. The medications were administered in 212 cases (19.7%), which resulted in an untoward effect in nine cases (0.8%).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The most common errors were wrong dosage and wrong drug. Many incidents involved preregistration house officers and HPs. Our computerized systems appeared to reduce medication incidents.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medicine, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Song
authors.forename: W C M
authors.initials: WC
authors.lastname: Chui
authors.forename: C P
authors.initials: CP
authors.lastname: Lau
authors.forename: B M Y
authors.initials: BM
authors.lastname: Cheung
mesh_terms: D011307:Drug Prescriptions / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006723:Hong Kong; D006769:Hospitals, General / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006785:Hospitals, University / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D050316:Medical Order Entry Systems / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D008508:Medication Errors / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*