Medication dispensing errors at a public pediatric hospital

OBJECTIVE: assess the safety of medication dispensing processes through the dispensing error rate. METHOD: Cross-sectional study carried out at a pharmaceutical service of a pediatric hospital in Espírito Santo, Brazil. Data collection was performed between August and September 2006, totaling 2620 prescribed medication doses. Any deviation from the medical prescription in dispensing medication was considered a dispensing error. THE CATEGORIES OF MEDICATION ERRORS WERE: content, labeling, and documentation errors. The dispensing error rate was computed by dividing the number of errors by the total of dispensed doses. RESULTS: From the 300 identified errors, 262 (87.3 %) were content errors. The rate of errors in the labeling and documentation categories was 33 (11%) and 5 (1.7%), respectively. CONCLUSION: The total dispensing error rate was higher than rates reported in international studies. The most frequent category was "content error".