Effect of education on the recording of medicines on admission to hospital.

BACKGROUND

The inaccurate recording of medicines on admission to hospital is an important cause of medication error. Medication reconciliation has been used to identify and correct these errors.

OBJECTIVE

To determine if a multimodal intervention involving medication reconciliation with real-time feedback and education would reduce the number of errors made by medical staff when recording medicines at the time of admission to hospital.

DESIGN

Observational study.

PARTICIPANTS

Patients admitted to the general medical wards of a teaching hospital were studied prospectively. Patients > or =75 years of age and on > or =5 medications were identified as the 'target group.'

INTERVENTION

After admission, a second medication history was taken, and discrepancies were identified and communicated to the medical teams. An educational intervention to encourage prescribers to obtain accurate medication histories was conducted at the same time.

MEASUREMENTS

The discrepancy rate was measured before and after the intervention.

MAIN RESULTS

There were 470 admissions in the 'target group.' Three hundred and thirty-eight of the admissions (71.9%) had one or more unintentional discrepancies. Although many discrepancies had little potential to cause harm, 33% were rated as clinically significant. During the study the discrepancy rate (prior to reconciliation) fell from 2.6 (SD 2.6) to 1.0 (SD 1.1) per admission (p < 0.0001). This decline in discrepancy rate remained significant (p = 0.001) even when only clinically important discrepancies were included. The proportion of admissions with one or more clinically important discrepancies also decreased during the study from 46% to 24% (p = 0.023).

CONCLUSIONS

Errors in the recording of medicines at the time of hospital admission are common. Combining the feedback provided by medication reconciliation with prescriber education reduced the error rate. This approach may be useful when the resources are not available to perform medication reconciliation for all patients admitted to hospital.