Among patients patients were diagnosed with

Among 200 patients, 77 (38.5%) patients were diagnosed with hypertension, followed by 55 (27.5%) with diabetes, 50 (25%) with urinary tract infections and other diseases are summarized in Table 5. Majority of observed medication errors were found with drug class belonging to phenylephrine hydrochloride Supplier 9 (22.5%) and bronchodilators 9 (22.5%) followed by antihypertensive 8 (20%) and other drug class involved in medication errors are summarized in Table 6.
Discussion The overall percentage of medication errors observed in our study is 20% without causing any harm to the patients whereas in a study conducted by Reddy P et al. the incidence of medication errors was found to be 66.32% without any fatal outcome [15]. The age wise distribution of medication errors in this study shown that patients who are aged above 61 years experienced 40% medication errors. Similar results were observed in a study carried out by Rekha B et al. where it was reported that high prevalence of medication errors in older adults are due to polypharmacy and polymorbidity [16]. In the present study male patients outnumber the female patients by experiencing 75% medication errors because male patients were more in numbers which is contrast to the study conducted by Habsi A et al. where medication errors in prescriptions obtained by female were 67.6% when compared to male patients [17]. The present study revealed that the risk of medication errors increases as the number of medications per prescription increases. It was observed that an increased number of medication errors when the patient had medications more than 11 and experienced 17 errors. The similar results were reported by Shufiza N et al. [18]. The present study also shown that the length of hospital stay increases with the increase in number of medication errors. Majority of the observed medication errors were found with drugs belonging to the class of antibiotics (22.5%) and bronchodilators whereas in a study conducted by Morimoto T et al. the percentage of antibiotics involved in medication errors causing adverse drug event was 36% [19]. In the present study omission error was the most frequently occurring error (77.5%) which is very similar to a study conducted by Dabaghzadeh et al. where omission error was found to be only 29.6%. The reason for this is unavailability of the similar brands of the prescribed drugs in the hospital [20]. While assessing the level of harm caused by medication errors, it was reported that out of 40 observed medication errors 35 were in the category C of NCCMERP index and other 5 errors were in the category E whereas Reddy P et al. reported that the observed medication errors were in the category C (48.82%) and remaining were under other category [15]. There must be an effective medication error reporting system in the hospital to ensure safe medication practice which is not available at present. In addition to that, implementation of computerized physician orders may reduce prescription writing errors. The present study screened for WHO prescription writing guidelines for outpatients where it is found that majority of the prescriptions lack prescriber’s personal contact number, patient details such as name, address and age of the patients which is similar to the study conducted by Gul W et al. where most of the prescriptions did not have patient’s details and prescriber’s details [21]. Lack of patient demographic details in the prescriptions are always a foundation of potential to severe medication errors like dispensing of medication to erroneous patient. Age of the patient is essential to be mentioned in the prescriptions. This will helps the selection of accurate dose of any drug to the patients and it may also helps in dispensing the right dosage form of the drug. In the present study, 90.64% of the prescriptions were mentioned prescribers name. Whereas the study conducted by Wali A et al., prescribers name was present in only 1.5% of the prescriptions [22]. So the present study results revealed that there is a better trend of mentioning the prescribers name in India as compared to Pakistan.