What are incident reports telling us? A comparative study at two Australian hospitals of medication errors identified at audit, detected by staff and reported to an incident system

Abstract

Prescribing errors with the potential to cause harm frequently go undetected. Reported incidents do not reflect the profile of medication errors which occur in hospitals or the underlying rates. This demonstrates the inaccuracy of using incident frequency to compare patient risk or quality performance within or across hospitals. New approaches including data mining of electronic clinical information systems are required to support more effective medication error detection and mitigation.