Medication safety in hospitals.

Medication error and adverse drug reactions occur frequently, leading to a high burden of patient harm in the hospital setting. Many Irish hospitals have established medication safety initiatives, designed to encourage reporting and learning to improve medication use processes and therefore patient safety. Eight Irish hospitals or hospital networks provided data from voluntary medication safety incident and near miss reporting programmes for pooled analysis of events occurring between 1st January 2006 and 30th June 2007. 6179 reports were received in total (mean 772 per hospital; range 96-1855). 95% of reports did not involve patient harm. Forty seven percent of reports related to the prescribing stage of the medication use process, 40% to the administration stage and 9% to the pharmacy dispensing stage. This data is published to increase awareness of this key patient safety issue, to share learning from these incidents and near misses and to encourage a more open patient safety culture.