Background: Medication reconciliation errors, also known as unintentional discrepancies, are frequent during admission, especially in chronic patients, and have an impact on safety. Educational interventions can be a reduction strategy.
Material and methods: Quasi-experimental study, before-after design. Participants were chronic patients admitted into hospitalization services. Medication reconciliation was conducted at admission. The intervention consisted of a training to each prescribing physician with study contents and printed educational material. To study the association between intervention and change of frequency of unintentional discrepancies was made a logistic regression model, adjusting for selected variables.
Results: A sample of 54 patients was studied in each stage. In the first stage it was observed that 42.6% of patients had at least one unintentional discrepancy. After intervention the proportion of patients with at least one unintentional discrepancy decreased to 24.1% (p = 0.041). In both stages, omission was the main category of unintentional discrepancy. The significant reduction after the intervention is maintained by controlling for variables such as emergency admission and pre-admission service.
Conclusions: Incidence of unintentional discrepancies in admission is high in chronic hospitalized patients and can be reduced through an educative strategy.
Keywords: Admisión paciente; Conciliación de la medicación; Errores de medicación; Medication Errors; Medication Reconciliation; Patient Admission; Patient Safety; Seguridad del paciente.
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