Abstract

Background: The use of medication is a complex process and the health-care providers discovered more problems facing this process at different many stages including prescriber, pharmacists, and finally patients. It is expected that the rate of errors in prescriptions will be higher for pediatrics compared with other population due to multiple factors (e.g., medications dosing, pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics).
Objective: To evaluate the pattern of medication prescribing errors in the pediatric outpatient clinics and assess the type of prescribing errors. In addition, to evaluate the most prevalent type of medication category that is associated with prescribing errors.
Materials and Methods: In our study, all outpatient prescriptions that were processed and dispensed for pediatric patients (<14 years old), flagged with medication clarification record were retrieved to be included in the analysis. Demographic data (age, gender, allergy status, and diagnosis), in addition to medication and error characteristics (number of medication per prescription, number of medication prescribing error per prescription, types of medication prescribing error), and medications category (e.g., antimicrobials, cardiac, pulmonary, gastrointestinal, analgesics, electrolytes, and topical) were collected.
Results: Results showed that the most common type of medication errors was missing diagnosis in the prescription and incorrect dose with 59.6% and 54.1%, respectively. The mean age of both genders was 5.5 years (±4.3). The most common categories of medication involved were neurological medications, antipyretic, analgesic, and antimicrobials with 20.8%, 17.5%, and 15%, respectively. The number of high-alert medications in the detected medication/s error was 0.60%. Conclusion: The rate of documented pediatric outpatient prescribing errors by outpatient pharmacists was was 0.57%. In which, missing diagnosis was the most common type of prescribing errors followed by incorrect dose. In addition, the highest medication group that has prescribing error is neurological medications followed by analgesics.