Medication without harm: developing optimal medication error reporting systems

Medication errors are amongst the most frequently occurring healthcare-related incidents and have the potential to lead to life-threatening harm to patients. An incident reporting system is a traditional approach to the improvement of patient safety and entails the retrieval of information from incident reports. This not only provides a better understanding of causes and contributing factors but also enables the collection of data on the severity of incidents, system deficiencies and the role of human factors in safety incidents. Medication error reporting systems are often developed as a part of larger incident reporting systems that deal with other types of incidents. Although a rise in the prevalence of medication errors has led to an increased demand for medication error reporting, little is known about the characteristics and limitations of medication error reporting systems. The authors broach the subject of medication error reporting systems and propose a more robust and standardized approach.