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

Abstract

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.

Figure 1

Sticker placed into the hospital notes to provide feedback to the medical team and allow review of discrepancies.

Figure 2

Distribution of the number of medication discrepancies per admission as a proportion of all patient admissions in the target population.

Figure 3

Effect of the intervention on the mean number of discrepancies per admission for each 2-week period of the intervention in the target population.

Figure 4

The mean number of discrepancies per admission according to the number of medicines taken by the patient prior to admission.