Laurence Goldberg FRPharmS

A medication error is defined as "any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while the medication is in the control of the healthcare professional, patient, or consumer,” according to the National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting and Prevention. An estimated 237 million medication errors occur in the NHS in England every year.[1] This number represents the sum of medication errors over all stages of the medication use process. Most errors occur during drug administration (54%), followed by prescribing (21%) and dispensi

In unit-dose dispensing, medication is dispensed in single doses in packages that are ready to administer to the patient. It can be used for medicines administered by any route, but oral, parenteral, and respiratory routes are especially common. The system provides a fully closed-loop process where the patient, the drug and the healthcare professional are identified by machine readable codes and the drug administration process is linked directly to the electronic prescription and is fully recorded There are many variations of unit-dose dispensing. As just one example, when doctors w