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.