Understanding and preventing vaccination errors

Abstract

Introduction: Vaccine-related medication errors can occur at each step of the vaccination process: prescribing, dispensing, preparation, administration, monitoring, transport, and storage. We aimed to describe current knowledge of vaccination-related errors to identify areas for improvement.

Material and methods: We performed a literature review on PubMed, using MeSH terms, from 1998 to 2020 to identify articles that would illustrate vaccine-related medication errors. We developed a questionnaire for health professionals concerning prescribing, dispensing, or administering vaccines via Facebook, and then identified priority areas for information to reduce vaccine-related medication errors.

Results: A total of 227 answers were collected from midwives (N = 90), pharmacists or technicians (N = 75), and physicians or interns (N = 62). Practitioners gave wrong answers on live vaccines administered during pregnancy (>10 % of physicians), incorrect acronyms for the DTCaP (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, poliomyelitis) vaccine corresponding to branded products (72 % of midwives), lack of marketing authorization knowledge for the influenza vaccine (46 %), duration of vaccine conservation outside of the refrigerator (52 %), or intravenous administration of the rotavirus vaccine (23 %). Most health professionals mentioned the possibility of writing procedures for the various steps of the vaccine process, but only few of them have actually done it (15 % for dispensing/administration versus 61 % for storage). Ten key points for initial or ongoing training of health professionals have been summarized.

Conclusion: There is partial mastery of vaccine knowledge among health professionals. Our final table presents the most important elements of these results for educating health professionals on potential vaccine-related medication errors.

Keywords: Children; Health professional knowledge; Vaccination errors; Vaccine.