Nurses' Opinions on Medication Errors

Objectives: This study describes the nurses' opinion on MEs on selected domains i.e., MEs and its causes, nonpunitive culture, culture of reporting and barriers of reporting on MEs; to establish the level&extent of MEs as opined by nurses; to assess the association between the selected socio-demographic variable on MEs opined by nurses and aims to measure the preferential ranking on potential causes for MEs as perceived by the nurses.

Method: The study is a descriptive survey design with nonprobability purposive random sampling technique used to draw 168 nurses working in multispecialty private hospital by using structured selfadministered questionnaires.

Results: The overall nurses' opinion regarding MEs is found to be moderate level among 82.7% and high level among 17.3% of nurses. Association between the nurses' opinion on MEs and the demographic variables like nurses' age, marital status, designation and total clinical experience found to be statistically significant at P<0.05 level. Preferential ranking as perceived by nurses on potential causes for MEs, revealed that the top five ranking noticed that the sound alike drugs followed by illegible hand writing, calculation of dosage, telephonic and oral order ranked second, third, fourth and fifth respectively.