Pharmaceutical Care Plan and Pharmacist Intervention against Medication Errors in Geriatric Patients

Objectives: Main objective of the study was to evaluate, categorize the errors and to reduce the medication errors in geriatric inpatients, to find out what types of errors are happening in our hospital and to suggest the clinical pharmacist directed interventions to improve the better patient outcomes. Methodology: The entire study was divided into two phases namely Phase 1 and Phase 2. In the phase 1, it was assessed, analyzed and categorized that each error happened during the gap of 3 months and in the phase 2, the collected errors were put forward to the health professionals and awareness class was conducted for them about the medication errors by using leaflets, newsletter and also through individual counseling. The results obtained from the phase 1was then compared to that of the phase 2. Results: The total number of patients involved in the study was 213 in number. Among them in phase 1 there were 154 number of errors out of 110 patients whereas in the phase 2 there was 101 number of errors out of 103 patients(p value <0.05). Hence, this implies a statistically significant reduction of errors as our p value(0.02) is less than 0.05. Conclusion: The study provided a complete evaluation, categorization and analysis of different medication errors seen in the departments of general medicine, neurology, nephrology and pulmonology. The errors so obtained were grouped as per the types of medication errors namely prescription errors, administration errors, reconciliation errors, dispensing errors, transcription errors, storage errors, documentation errors and others.