<div>Dear editor,</div><div>Please find the enclosed manuscript entitled: “<b>Refinement of
management effectively reduces dispensing errors: 12-year experience
from an outpatient pharmacy</b> ” to be submitted
to Journal of
Evaluation in Clinical Practice for consideration of publication.</div><div>Medication errors are common in hospital pharmacy and have a serious
negative impact on people’s health and economy. Thus, improving the
management of hospital outpatient pharmacy was essential to reduce
medication errors. In this manuscript, we retrospected the refined
management focusing on dispensing errors without automatic dispensing
machine for the past 12 years. PDCA cycle was applied as the tool for
quality management. Data for dispensing errors, stocks and accounts
management from 2008 to 2019 was collected from the electronic system
and evaluated using direct observation method. As a result, after a
12-year refined management using PDCA cycle, the consistent rate of the
stocks and accounts was significantly increased (86.93% vs 99.54%,<i>p &lt; 0.05</i> ). A remarkable reduction of error rate was
achieved (0.014% vs 0.0006%, <i>p &lt; 0.05</i> ) and the rate
of dispensing errors was significantly reduced (0.019% vs 0.000034%,<i>p &lt; 0.05</i> ). Besides, the technicians improved themselves
during this procedure. In summary, we provided practical management
experience to reduce medication errors in a large-scale hospital without
automatic dispensing machine. To our knowledge, there is no such a
report on the refined management of reducing dispensing errors using
PDCA cycle.</div><div>We certify that the paper has not been submitted elsewhere in similar
form, and all authors have contributed significantly to publication.
Besides, all authors are aware of the submission and agree with it.</div><div>Sincerely yours,</div><div>Ping Fan</div><div>Outpatient pharmacy of Pharmacy
department,</div><div>Department of Clinical Pharmacy,</div><div>West China Hospital,</div><div>Sichuan University.</div><div>Chengdu 610041, China.</div><div>E-mail: 825370320@qq.com</div><div>Tel./Fax: 028-85422096</div>