Medication Error Incidence (Parenteral Therapy) at Government Hospital in Magelang

Patient safety is the key to maintain the quality of health services. One of the most important things to achieve patient safety is to identify medication errors and its causes. Most cases of medication errors are reported by nurses, because nurses are the therapeutic team. The purpose of this study is to determine factors affecting medication error by nurse in giving parenteral therapy at Government Hospital in Magelang. A cross-sectional analytic study was carried out on 67 nurses working in hospital wards. The data were collected using a questionnaire filled by respondents to see medication errors within 3 months. The final number of medication errors were  91 incidents in 3 months. The most frequent errors were wrong time (51.7%), wrong dose (14.2%), wrong document and wrong drug (9.9%), wrong route (8.8%), and the least was wrong patient (5%). Although the medication error incidences were not sentinel events and didn’t affect to SNARs criteria, but it still affecting on the quality of health services in the hospital. The significant independent determinant of medication errors is working experience at Government Hospital in Magelang (p 0,001), while the other determinants are not. Conclusion in this study was significant correlation between work experience in hospital and medication error, where respondents with work experience at Government Hospital in Magelangless than 5 years tend to be at higher risk doing medication errors than those who having worked more or equivalent to 5 years.