Evaluation of Dispensing Medication Errors in Pharmaceutical Practice among Direct Oral Anticoagulants Prescriptions

Activity: Talk or presentation types › Oral presentation

Description

According to Europe Medicine Agency, medication errors (MEs) are unintended failure related to medical treatment that has the potential to harm patients. MEs in prescribing, dispensing, storing, preparation and administration are usual, and a significant part of them are preventable. Pharmacists should be attentive because they are the last ones who dispense medicine to patients. This study aimed to describe the most common dispensing MEs among electronically prescribed DOACs using brand names at pharmacies in Latvia.. Electronically prescribed direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs) using brand names Xarelto (rivaroxaban), Pradaxa (dabigatran), Lixiana (edoxaban) and Eliquis (apixaban) were retrospectively analysed in this study. Anonymised patients’ data, prescribed and dispensed medicine description was obtained from the Latvian National Health Service electronic prescription database from January 1, 2017, to June 30, 2022.. Entirety, 412726 prescriptions were acquired, of whom 362580 (87.9%) were dispensed 447275 times in a pharmacy. The total amount of dispensing MEs was 14137 (3.2%). The most frequent issue (n=14033) was that dispensed DOAC doses were larger or smaller than the ones prescribed by physicians. In 12 prescriptions, patients obtained other DOAC. Furthermore, patients received medicines from other pharmacological groups in 92 cases, of whom 19.6% (n=18) had different drug forms. The letter X was present in 26 medicine brand names. There were discovered sound-alike medication errors such as Xarelto to Xefo (n=2), Pradaxa to Plavix (n=2), and Lixiana to Lexotanil (n=1).. This prescription cohort has a relatively high dispensing MEs rate (>3%). Further investigations are needed to better understand the reasons for this and establish interventions for minimising dispensing MEs. Implementing mechanisms to avoid confusing look-alike and sound-alike (LASA) medicine is also essential.
Period29 Mar 2023
Event titleRSU International Research Conference 2023: Knowledge for Use in Practice
Event typeConference
OrganiserRīga Stradiņš University
LocationRiga, LatviaShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

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