Older adults are particularly vulnerable to medication-related safety events. This systematic review including 21 studies on medication-related problems in in older adults identified several types of safety issues (e.g., potentially inappropriate prescribing, polypharmacy, adverse drug reactions) that lead to poor outcomes among older adults in nursing homes, inpatient care, and community settings. The authors found the classes of medication related problems are similar to studies from a decade ago, suggesting that more intensive monitoring is needed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all aspects of healthcare delivery for both patients and health care workers. This study explored the how COVID-19-related policies and initiatives intended to improve patient safety impacted workflow, system adaptations, as well as organizational and individual resilience among community pharmacists.

This systematic review found that incidence rates of medication errors in primary care ranged between 1% and 90% across included studies, suggesting that further research is needed to identify the true incidence. The authors identified most errors in the prescribing stage, and older patients and children seem to be at highest risk.

This study is the second phase of the United Kingdom's Safer Patients Initiative (SPI), a large-scale effort to improve patient safety through multifaceted interventions and an independent evaluation. Similar to the first phase study, this one demonstrated little added benefit of SPI on key safety outcomes in 20 hospitals, though overall safety did improve. An accompanying editorial [see link below] discusses the study findings and emphasizes the continued need to run toward science rather than away from it in evaluating quality improvement efforts.

Analysis of incident reports revealed a lower than expected number of reports involving handoffs, most of which did not result in patient harm.

This study found a high incidence of medication prescribing and administration errors at five pediatric hospitals in the United Kingdom.

Complex drug regimens have been associated with medication errors in pediatric ambulatory practice. This study found that a commercial electronic prescribing system nearly eliminated handwriting errors in a pediatric specialty clinic, though actual adverse drug events were not measured.

The authors reviewed the literature on pediatric medication errors to explore incidence and error types. They found that dosing errors were most common.

The investigators studied five acute care wards in Belgium to explore factors contributing to inappropriate medication use in elderly patients. They determined that focus on short-term treatment, passive attitudes toward learning, and physician-patient relationships affected prescribing activity.