Preventable medication-related events in hospitalised children in New Zealand.

Abstract

Preventable medication-related events occur commonly in the paediatric inpatient setting, and importantly over half of the events that caused patient harm were deemed preventable. Voluntary staff reporting in a quality improvement environment was found to be inferior to chart review for identifying events, but a vast improvement on the conventional incident reporting system. Most commonly implicated in the harmful or potentially harmful preventable events, and hence the best targets for prevention are dosing errors, particularly during the prescribing stage of the medication use process, and use of antibacterial agents, particularly when administered by the intravenous route.