Journal of

Background: Patient safety is one of the key principals to the trust in any health care system nowadays. Medication errors, as a key safety threatening factors, could increase patients’ length of stay and healthcare costs in hospitals and might lead into injury and finally death. Therefore, this study seeks to compare the incidence and proposed solutions of Iran and selected countries in order for preventing medication errors.

Materials and Methods: This applicable study is a review article searching in such databases as SID, IranMedex, Pubmed, and Scopus to identify and select its related papers. At last, 25 studies were considered for this study.

Results: According to the results of studies, shortage of nurses, nurses’ inexperience, job stress, physicians’ handwriting and lack of information on medications were the highly frequent incidence causes. Training courses on medicine dispensing and hands-on training were the most important solution.

Conclusion: Given the existing gap between the medication errors incidence rate of Iran and selected countries, the latter’s experiences such as transparency and responsibility and active role of hospital pharmacies could be utilized by the former.

Background: Using vein by Peripheral Catheter is one of the important ways to provid water, electrolytes, medications and nutrients to patients in hospitals and other therapeutic centers. Phlebitis is an important complication of using peripheral cannula. This study performed to determine the incidence of phlebitis related to peripheral cannulae, and its effecting factors.

Materials and Methods: This prospective and analytical study was conducted in adult's medical- surgical units of Shahid Sadoughi Yazd. Two hundred ninety seven cannulae of 297 patients were assessed. Phlebitis was identified by the presence of at least two following symptoms including local pain, redness, swelling, warmth and palpable venous cord.

Results: The mean of patients' age was 40.82±19.48 (12-91 yrs.). The phlebitis incidence rate was 14.1%. Some factors such as smoking (P=0.007), diabetes (P=0.001) had positive and significant association with phlebitis incidence rate. Odd Ratio for smoking and diabetes were 3.107(CI=1.310-7.372, 95%) and 3.736(CI=1.736-8.039, 95%) respectively.

Conclusion: Study findings revealed that overall incidence rate of phlebitis compare with other similar studies was low. Study results indicated high phlebitis incidence in smokers, diabetic patients, and elder patients which can be prevented by considering phlebitis incidence in impatiens.