Patient safety concerns in community pharmacies can result in medication errors and patient harm.

This qualitative study used an innovative approach to examine prospective medication dispensing errors using a two-step approach. Observers conducted a Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) to identify tasks and sub-tasks, identified potential dispensing errors, and then identified remedial solutions designed to avoid potential errors.

The analysis identified 88 potential errors and 35 remedial solutions. The solutions were labeled as strong (14%), intermediate (40%), or weak (46%), based on an established patient safety hierarchy, which could allow the teams to put stronger prevention practices in anticipation of errors. Authors suggest future work should focus on further evaluation or piloting of the solutions to see if they result in improvement.