PhD defence J.G. (Janique) Jessurun

Summary:

At least 1 in 20 patients in healthcare settings is affected by preventable harm, most frequently caused by medication-related incidents. In hospitals, many interventions to improve medication safety have been explored, but errors still occur throughout the medication process. The studies presented in this thesis focus on estimating the prevalence of intravenous admixture preparation errors as well as medication administration errors in a hospital setting. An additional aim was to identify potential risk factors of these errors, which may help to design effective preventive strategies. We also studied the effect of two promising strategies to prevent medication errors in a hospital setting: a pharmacy-based intravenous admixture service and a central automated unit dose dispensing combined with barcode-assisted medication administration.
This thesis highlights the fact that despite the many medication safety initiatives in hospitals, medication preparation and administration errors still frequently occur. This emphasises the need to identify and implement additional interventions to prevent these errors. This thesis also shows that the two studied interventions were effective in reducing the occurrence of medication errors. In addition, insights are provided into the types of errors and risk factors of errors, which may elicit new preventive strategies.