AB1292-HPR NUMBER OF DRUGS IN THE PRESCRIPTION, A PREDISPOSING FACTOR FOR MEDICATION ERRORS IN RHEUMATOLOGY
Authors: L. Santoyo-Fexas, R. A. Uriarte Botello, B. R. Vázquez Fuentes, C. V. Solis, C. M. Skinner Taylor, I. D. J. Hernandez-Galarza, M. Eguia Bernal, D. Á. Galarza-Delgado
Journal: Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases (2020)

Background: Medication error can be defined as a failure in the treatment process that leads to or has the potential to lead to harm to the patient, this fault can happen in two different phases: prescribing and prescription. Prescribing is the process of deciding what to prescribe and naming it. Various types of faults can occur in the decision-making process: underprescribing, overprescribing, irrational, inappropriate and ineffective prescribing. All these covers one type of errors, but these are different kind of errors that those that occur in the act of writing a prescription. This leads to the distinct concepts of ‘prescribing faults’ and ‘prescription errors’ A prescription is ‘a written order, which includes detailed instructions of what medicine should be given, to whom, in what formulation and dose, by what route, when, how frequently, and for how long’. Thus, a prescription error can be defined as ‘a failure in the prescription writing process that results in a wrong instruction about one or more of the normal features of a prescription’. The ‘normal features’ include the identity of the patient, the identity of the drug, the formulation and dose, and the route, timing, frequency, and duration of administration. (1) It is not record about the rate of medication errors in rheumatology consultation. Objectives: To evaluate whether there is a relationship between prescribing errors and the number of drugs in the prescription. Methods: A descriptive, observational, and retrospective study was made. It was carried out a random search of medical prescriptions, generated by the electronic records (REPAIR®) of the rheumatology consultation of the Hospital Universitario “Dr. José Eleuterio González” during 2019, in which the prescriptions that contained any error were identified T student test was performed to see the difference in the prescription error based on the number of medications. P &lt;0.05 was taken as statistically significant. Results: A review of 867 medical prescriptions was performed, among which 5503 medications were indicated with an average of 6.34 medications per prescription, a total of 30 (6.9%) prescriptions were found with error, where a total of 71 (3.9%) medications had errors. In the prescriptions with medication error, all the errors were prescription type; 68 (95.7%) had a mistake in the duration of administration and 3 (4.22%) in the identity of the drug. In the prescriptions with medical errors the average number of prescription drugs was 7.50, only 2/30 (0.6%) had less than 7 indicated medications (4 and 6), meanwhile the prescriptions in which no error was found had a mean of 6.30 indicated medications. P &lt; 0.001. Conclusion: According to the study findings, it could be established that when the number of prescribed medications is greater than 7, there is an increased risk of making a prescription error. Further studies should carry out to look for other factors that influence medical errors in rheumatology clinics. References: [1]Aronson JK. Medication errors: definitions and classification. Br J Clin Pharmacol. 2009;67(6):599-604. Acknowledgments Disclosure of Interests: None declared