Factors Contributing Toward Medication Errors Among Nursing Staff in Shafi Hospital in Hodan District, Mogadishu.

Abstract

Medication errors are common in hospitalized patients which are main concerns in healthcare systems worldwide. Medication errors is any mistake that occur during the medication use process, medication errors can begin in the course of prescribing, dispensing, transcribing, administering and monitoring medicines (European medicines agency, 2015). The aim of this study was to investigate factors contributing towards medication error among nursing staff in shafi hospital in Hodan district, Mogadishu, Somalia. The specific objectives were to identify factors contributed medication error among nurse staff in shafi hospital and to determine frequency of medication error among nurse staff in shafi hospital. The method used was descriptive cross sectional using both qualitative and quantitative. The data collecting in Shafi hospital during May, 2017 using structured questionnaire and observation checklist. A total of 20 respondents from Nurse Staff working different departments of shafi hospital were purposively selected, data collected were analyzed using SPSS version 20. The researchers observed that 85% of the medication errors among nurse staff were due to fatigue due to high workload while 70% of the respondents agreed that low ratio of nurse to patient were also main contributing factor of medication errors among nurse staff in shafi hospital. During last month more than 4 medication errors were estimated to happen among nurse staff. The study concludes that the most common medication errors among nurse staff in shafi hospital were due to wrong dose calculation which accounts nearly 40%. This study recommends recruiting more nursing staff, to increase nurse to patient ratio and subsequently increase working interval of the nurse staff to decrease work load and availability of medication error recording and reporting system can reduce errors.