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: Medical errors and adverse events are the main reasons of many avoidable deaths and imposed expenditures in worldwide health systems. Hence, this study aimed to recognize some challenges, medical errors and adverse events, and to address the appropriate solutions in order to solve them in the Iranian health system.

Materials and Methods: This qualitative study had three main data resources including key informants, national documents and expert panel. Key informants (30 persons) and experts (12 persons) were selected purposefully from macro, meso and micro levels of health system and some other health related organizations. Data were interpreted and analyzed through a mixed (inductive/deductive) thematic framework.

Results: Although, most reasons of medical errors were in relation with weak patient security system and low level security culture in hospitals, other factors like manpower, physical and external agents of hospital environment induced these errors as well. The most considerable solutions to decrease the medical errors comprised identification of medical error reasons in different levels of heath system, errors documentation and generation a consolidated system for recognition and following the errors and their main causes.

Conclusion: Relieveing the reasons of medical errors and adverse events can be a great step to prevent them. In order to eliminate the medical errors and its challenges, it is necessary to develop the consonant programs in national level via conclusive will of organizations, groups and related individuals.