Assessment of Documented Pharmacists Interventions Across Secondary Healthcare Facilities in FCT, Abuja, Nigeria: A Retrospective Study

Background: Pharmacists play a vital role in ensuring medication safety through their practice of pharmaceutical care. Prescription writing is the responsibility of the prescriber which provides information about medication use to a patient. Errors from Outpatient prescription can pose a significant challenge to patient safety and well-being. Objective: To assess Pharmacists interventions on documented outpatient prescription errors across selected Secondary Healthcare facilities in Abuja, Nigeria. Methods: The study was a cross sectional descriptive study carried out retrospectively on prescription errors intervened by the Pharmacists in the Outpatient pharmacies of nine Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Secondary Healthcare Facilities between 2018 and 2022. Systematic random sampling and simple random sampling techniques were used. Data were analyzed using IBM Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 29.0. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were presented in tables and figures. Similarly, Chi square test was used to analyze the association between the variables, and p<0.05 was stated as statistically significant. Results: Two hundred and ten (210) interventions were analyzed. Adult patients outnumbered pediatric patients, accounting for more than 75.7% of the documented interventions. On the other hand, 50.0% of the sample population were adult females while participants with weight greater than 55Kg were the majority. Furthermore, the interventions that had more than one medical condition (36%) were frequently intervened while overdosage with (26%) was the highest prescription errors encountered whereas 85.3% of consequences of non-intervention were found to be severe. Similarly, there was an association between category of prescription errors and patients age, sex, Pharmacist intervention and consequences of not intervening (p<0.001). Conclusion: Pharmacists intervention is essential in preventing prescription error from reaching the patient.