Programa multidisciplinario de prevención de errores de medicación en un hospital

The importance of obtaining an explicit commitment from the hospital administration to transform the culture of the institution and to provide the necessary resources, as well as to create a multidisciplinary committee including pharmacists, physicians, nurses, and administrators is emphasized. This committee should be charged with encouraging the creation of a culture of safety and at the same time with developing the procedures required to continually study, evaluate, and improve the safety of the medication use system. All of this presupposes a sequence of actions that includes, first of all, the establishment of methods for detecting MEs when they occur, which may include voluntary reporting, as the basic method, and computer alert systems. Next, analysis and evaluation of the detected MEs should be carried out to identify existing faults in the system. Finally, the fundamental step in the program is the implantation of measures for improvement according to the failures detected, with appropriate follow-up of results in terms of error prevention.