Medicines in Australian nursing homes: a cross-sectional observational study of the accuracy and suitability of re-packing medicines into pharmacy-supplied dose administration aids.
Res Social Adm Pharm
; 9(6): 876-83, 2013.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-23499486
BACKGROUND: Though staff at Australian nursing homes (NHs) commonly administer medicines that have been re-packed into dose administration aids (DAAs) that organize medicines according to dose schedule, these pharmacy-supplied devices have not been extensively evaluated in the Australian setting. OBJECTIVE: To audit the accuracy and suitability of re-packing medicines into DAAs (blister packs or sachets) for NHs and identify the proportion of DAAs with inaccurate or unsuitable medicine re-packing. METHODS: Between January and June 2011, pharmacist researchers visited 49 randomly and purposively selected NHs from rural, regional, and metropolitan Victoria (Australia) to audit a sample of residents' newly prepared DAAs that contained all of their regularly re-packed medicines for 1 week. Over 1 or 2 days, the pharmacy-supplied DAAs were compared with the current prescriber-prepared NH medicine chart. Any occurrences of inaccurately re-packed medicines (discrepancies, with verification as necessary) or unsuitable medicine re-packing were recorded as DAA incidents and descriptive statistics was used to analyze the data. RESULTS: Six hundred and eighty-four incidents occurring in 457 DAAs were detected from a total of 3959 DAAs audited for 1757 residents (incident rate of 11.5% of DAAs) from 49 participating NHs. Incidents were detected in 10.5% of blister packs and 14.5% of sachets. The top five incidents were unsuitable re-packing according to pharmaceutical guidelines (50.1%); added medicine (9.8%); incorrect quantity re-packed (5.4%); omitted medicine (5.3%); and damaged medicine (5.1%). CONCLUSIONS: The incident rate of inaccurate or unsuitable medicine re-packing within DAAs supplied to NHs for use in medicine administration was higher than in previous research. Recommendations include using current findings in conjunction with further research to develop a quality improvement initiative to reduce DAA incident rates and improve NH standard of care.
Palabras clave
Texto completo:
1
Colección:
01-internacional
Base de datos:
MEDLINE
Asunto principal:
Preparaciones Farmacéuticas
/
Errores de Medicación
/
Casas de Salud
Tipo de estudio:
Observational_studies
/
Prevalence_studies
/
Prognostic_studies
/
Risk_factors_studies
Límite:
Humans
País/Región como asunto:
Oceania
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Res Social Adm Pharm
Asunto de la revista:
FARMACIA
Año:
2013
Tipo del documento:
Article
País de afiliación:
Australia
Pais de publicación:
Estados Unidos