Uncovering the risks of anticancer therapy through incident report analysis using a newly developed medical oncology incident taxonomy.
Oncology is a high-risk care environment involving complex medication administration. In this study, researchers applied a previously validated taxonomy to identify and characterize medical oncology-related incidents at three cancer centers between January 2019 and December 2020. The majority of incidents involved four types of errors – prescriber ordering (22%), nursing care (15%), pharmacy (14%), and communication issues (15%). Nearly 45% of incidents reached the patient without causing harm, but 8.4% resulted in patient harm. The researchers identified nine intermediate- and high-risk scenarios carrying the greatest risk to patient safety, including infusion pump programming errors, patient identification errors, and treatment/scheduling errors.