# Medication Errors Detected in Primary Health Care after Hospital Discharge
## 4 Discussion  
The main aim of this research was to evaluate the systematic processing of the reconciliation of medication at hospital discharge, in a primary health care context, identifying discrepancies and medication errors. We further sought to analyze some demographic \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c c c} \hline \hline
**Medication Errors** & **Women** & **Men** & \(\boldsymbol{p}\)* \\ \hline Contraindicated medication & & & \\ \textless{}65 & 63 (4.9\%) & 48 (3.7\%) & \textless{}0.001 \\ \textgreater{}=65 & 175 (10.6\%) & 180 (9.6\%) & \textless{}0.01 \\ Duplicated medication & & & \\ \textless{}65 & 4 (0.3\%) & 2 (0.2\%) & \textless{}0.001 \\ \textgreater{}=65 & 11 (0.7\%) & 14 (0.8\%) & \textless{}0.01 \\ Medication omission & & & \\ \textless{}65 & 203 (15.0\%) & 227 (17.3\%) & 0.14 \\ \textgreater{}=65 & 464 (28.5\%) & 493 (26.3\%) & \textless{}0.01 \\ Dossage differences & & & \\ \textless{}65 & 56 (4.3\%) & 65 (4.9\%) & \textless{}0.05 \\ \textgreater{}=65 & 118 (7.2\%) & 123 (6.6\%) & \textless{}0.05 \\ Medication interactions & & & \\ \textless{}65 & 3 (0.2\%) & 1 (0.1\%) & \textless{}0.05 \\ \textgreater{}=65 & 15 (0.9\%) & 13 (0.7\%) & \textless{}0.05 \\ Coniliated patients & & & \\ \textless{}65 & 1281 (49.4\%) & 1312 (50.6\%) & \textless{}0.01 \\ \textgreater{}=65 & 1650 (46.8\%) & 1872 (53.2\%) & \textless{}0.01 \\ \hline
**Total** & **2931 (47.9\%)** & **3184 (52.1\%)** & **6115 (100\%)** \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}  
* Chi-squared test.  
\end{table} 
Table 6: Prevalence of medication errors, according to age and sex. Figure 1: Distribution of conciliated patients by sex and age strata. aspects of the patients, like age and gender, that could be associated with the occurrence of these errors. Our results show that performing medication helps to detect discrepancies and medication errors that can be solved before the patients begin their new treatments. Other studies have stated this, for different levels of healthcare transitions [5; 13; 18; 19]. Indeed, some national [3; 14; 15] and international health agencies [1; 2; 8; 11; 13] have stated that the process of medication conciliation is a useful strategy to reduce medication errors, preventing problems for patients. Some research [9; 16; 17; 18] describe that, due to the complexity of the process of conciliation, it is important to follow a structured method to optimize the adequacy of the treatments to the clinical situation of the patients. Thus, potential discrepancies and medication errors that could harm the patients can be detected and evaluated. Our results confirm this, as the physicians of the Andalusian Public Health Service follow a structured method of conciliation based on an online software, which provided the database that was analyzed. A systematic review performed on twenty interventions [5] found that most of these conciliations were performed in patients of 65 and over, poly-medicated, and in socio-medical centers and hospitals [5; 10; 20]. This high mean age, also found in our sample, seems otherwise logical, as older people usually require more hospital treatments. In addition, these patients usually need to take more medications. As a consequence of these two aspects, they are more eligible to perform the medication reconciliation process. As the studies evaluated used different methods, it was not possible to detect which conciliation methods were more effective [12; 16; 21]. Despite this, the authors concluded that discrepancies were prevalent, that they were generated in healthcare transitions, and thatthey were related to medication adverse effects, medication conciliation being the process to follow to avoid medication errors. Our findings do agree with these affirmations. In this same research, the authors found that more than 70% of the patients analyzed, after hospital discharge, showed some kind of discrepancies in their treatment, being the mean of medication errors per patient of 2.7. A total of 70.5% of these medication errors were found in patients 65 years and older.