Understanding human factors in patient safety when prescribing (13 September 2024)

Summary

It has been suggested that 1 in 30 patients are affected by preventable medication-related harm, with the highest prevalence (around 50%) occurring during prescribing. If you consider this statistic in the context of an average prescriber, a pharmacist who prescribes for ten patients a day could potentially cause a medication-related harm every six days.

This article in the Pharmaceutical Journal outlines how human factors can help in developing safe prescribing practices and reduce error risk. It aims to help pharmacists:

• describe the prevalence and types of prescribing errors that commonly occur;
• understand the relationship between human factors and patient safety;
• apply knowledge of human factors in a clinical or professional setting;
• recognise unsafe prescribing practices and develop potential strategies to reduce the risk of prescribing errors.

It looks at James Reason's Swiss cheese model and outlines how the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS) model can be applied in prescribing.

The article is free to access, but you will need to sign up for a free Pharmaceutical Journal account to view it.