Medication Safety in Clinical Practice: Error Patterns, Prevention Strategies, and Pharmacists' Contributions

Medication errors can occur at any point from prescribing to follow-up and remain a preventable source of patient harm. This narrative review examined contemporary evidence on error patterns, contributing conditions, preventive interventions, and pharmacists’ roles. English-language human studies indexed in PubMed and published between 1 January 2018 and 21 June 2026 were considered through focused searches covering medication safety, error prevention, clinical pharmacy, reconciliation, decision support, electronic prescribing, hospitals, and clinical practice. Twenty-eight articles were selected to provide representative evidence from systematic reviews, intervention studies, observational analyses, qualitative research, reporting datasets, and digital-system evaluations. Across care settings, dose errors, omissions, wrong-drug events, incomplete orders, infusion-rate errors, and discrepancies during care transitions were recurring problems. No single intervention addressed the entire medication-use pathway. Medication reconciliation, structured review and deprescribing, electronic prescribing with carefully governed decision support, standardisation, education, incident reporting, and multidisciplinary communication improved medication processes in selected settings; effects on readmission, mortality, and length of stay were less consistent. Pharmacists contributed most effectively when they were integrated into clinical decisions and transitions of care, had access to relevant patient information, and could resolve identified problems. Sustainable improvement depends on adequate staffing, interoperable medication information, meaningful outcome measurement, and a non-punitive learning culture.