A Nation-Wide Assessment of Community Pharmacists’ Attitude towards
Dispensing Medication Errors: A Cross-sectional Study
Abstract
Dispensing errors in community pharmacies are common reasons for a
patient’s injury and harm. Therefore, to improve patient safety in
relation to the use of medicine in the primary care setting, the study
sought to determine the attitude and perception of community pharmacists
towards dispensing errors. A survey-based cross-sectional study
consisted of 171 community pharmacists in different regions in Lebanon.
This study retrieved information about demographic data, perceived
factors associated with of dispensing errors, perceived strategies that
might reduce the risk for dispensing error, perceived types of
dispensing errors and reasons for underreporting dispensing errors. The
majority of the pharmacists were young between 20 to 35 years (87.1%)
and holding only BS degree in Pharmacy (66.7%). Poor prescription
handwriting (90%), unreadable prescriptions (89.4%) and heavy workload
(87.7%) were perceived as the main contributing factors for dispensing
error. While Collaboration with physicians (96.4%) and double-checking
(96%) of medications before dispensing were mainly appreciated to
decrease error incidents. The main reasons for underreporting dispensing
errors were non-mandatory reporting policy (58.5%) and absence of
national reporting system (55.6%). Dispensing errors were highly
associated with the quality of the prescription and heavy workload.
Pharmacists’ main reason for underreporting dispensing errors was mainly
due to lack of reporting systems that do not mandate the pharmacist to
report it. These findings enlighten future interventions to improve
pharmacy practices that aim in providing new directives for policies and
procedures for reporting and managing dispensing errors in the Lebanese
community pharmacies.