The Importance Of Medication Error Reporting In The Healthcare System

Medications errors are the most preventable cause of Adverse Drug Events (ADEs), leading to morbidity and mortality, and a reasonable requirement exists for health care systems to learn from MEs reported. To explore barriers to reporting MEs and to suggest strategies to improve reporting them among Health Care Practitioners “HCPs” in Latifa hospital in the United Arab Emirates in 2016.  A cross-sectional study examined attitudes towards reporting errors to the hospital by providing anonymous questionnaires to 200 nurses and 20 pharmacy staff. Data was collected using a questionnaire based on questions derived from a systematic review of literature for common barriers in reporting MEs. The questionnaire consisted of eleven items on barriers to reporting, and then the collected data were analyzed by using IBM SPSS Statistics. The most important barriers to reporting MEs were the creation of negative attitudes towards self, not keeping name anonymous, and blaming by co-workers. Awareness about the MER system and difficulty in its use were not major hindrance factors. Overall, attitudinal changes toward the reporting person were the major limiting factor along with the blame game within the facility. Therefore, it is suggested to improve the knowledge about the MER system by targeting non-punitive, non-blaming culture, and inter-personal professional relation improvement.