TITLE:
An opportunity for improvement with a medication reconciliation programme
AUTHORS:
Ana Belén Jiménez-Muñoz, Ana Clara Zoni, Esther Duran-Garcia, Paz Rodriguez Pérez, María Sanjurjo Saez, Rosa Pla-Mestre
KEYWORDS:
Medication Reconciliation; Admission; Unintended Discrepancies
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Internal Medicine,
Vol.3 No.4,
December
11,
2013
ABSTRACT: Medication reconciliation is priority in safety. Between 54% and
67% of hospitalized patients have at least
one unintended discrepancies (UDs) between pharmacological treatment
of a hospital inpatient and treatment that they were previously taking at home.
Quasi-experimental pre-post study performed. The objective is to assess the
impact of an intervention aimed at
decreasing UDs between medication prescribed on admission and patient’s
regular treatment. Patients who were hospitalised for more than 24 hours and
were undergoing treatment prior to admission which involved taking three or
more medicines were included. The number of patients included was 331 and 3781
medicines were reconciled. The incidence of UDs decreased significantly from
7.24% to 4.18%. Omission was the most common
UD, with a significant decrease from 5.8% to 3.4%. Respect to clinical impact, we observed that error type C (error reached patient without causing harm)
predominates, how- ever, experienced a
statistically significant decrease from 5.3% to 2.4%.