Towards a novel spontaneous medication error reporting tool for enhancing patient safety

Overview & Synopsis

Improving patient safety and quality of care has become a priority for healthcare organizations, given the frequency and potential severe clinical consequences of medication errors and adverse drug events during the Medication-use Process. Medication error reporting can be one most effective strategies to achieve these goals. Indeed, high error reporting rates indicate a positive safety culture rather than an unsafe healthcare environment. It is through the identification of these errors safety barriers can be put in place to prevent a similar event from occurring in the future. However, current healthcare organizations still suffer from a lack of attention in this context, especially in establishing a digital tool dedicated to medication error reporting, which is the motivation for the work described in this paper. The latter proposes a novel tool to make the local reporting of medication errors easier and encourage reporting these errors with the healthcare professionals' confidentially. The overall response to the tool provided was positive from the staff participating.