ABSTRACT
A medication error can be defined as, ‘any event that could cause or lead to a patient’s receiving inappropriate drug therapy or failing to receive appropriate drug therapy. The event could occur at any point from the decision to initiate therapy to the point at which the patient received the medication’ (Edgar et al., 1994, p. 1336). Errors may be potential (i.e., detected and corrected prior to the administration of the medication to the patient) or actual. In 1962, Barker and McConnell became the first to show that medication errors occur much more frequently than anyone had suspected-at a rate of 16 errors per 100 doses. More recently, one review article estimates that medication errors occur at a rate of one error per patient per day in most hospitals (Allan and Barker, 1990).
