ArticleBritish journal of clinical pharmacology2009
Medication errors: definitions and classification.
Article in British journal of clinical pharmacology, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT01734642 (A Regional Project to Reduce Adverse Drug Reactions Due to Medication Errors in Hospital), which is not on this map. Cited by 117 papers, 7 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
A Regional Project to Reduce Adverse Drug Reactions Due to Medication Errors in Hospital
Who cites it
117 citing papers in PubMed, 7 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Association Between Patient Race/Ethnicity, Health Literacy, Socio-Economic Status, and Incidence of Medication Errors: A Systematic Review.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2026Pooled it
- A systematic review of prescription errors in paediatric care.BMC health services research · 2025Pooled it
- Calculating the cost of medication errors: A systematic review of approaches and cost variables.BMJ open quality · 2024Pooled it
- Medication errors in hospitals in the Middle East: a systematic review of prevalence, nature, severity and contributory factors.European journal of clinical pharmacology · 2019Pooled it
- A systematic review of approaches for calculating the cost of medication errors.European journal of hospital pharmacy : science and practice · 2016Pooled it
- Pooled it
- Preventability of drug-related harms - part I: a systematic review.Drug safety · 2010Pooled it
- Patterns and Determinants of Medication Errors Across the Medication-Use Process:Saudi medical journal · 2026Observational
- Article
- Medication errors among elderly in-patients at an urban national referral hospital in Tanzania: Prevalence and patient profiles in a low-resource setting.African health sciences · 2026Article
- Beyond Human Error: Building Intelligent Resilience for Medication Safety in the ICU.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Machine learning for medication error detection: a scoping review.Research square · 2026Article
- Predicting clinically significant medication errors: Development and validation of a risk stratification model using incident reporting data.Frontiers in medicine · 2026Article
- An interpretable machine learning framework for adverse drug reaction prediction from drug-target interactions.PloS one · 2026Article
- Nurse-Led Quality Improvement Initiative to Reduce Medication Errors in Pediatric ICU.Indian pediatrics · 2026Article
- The Financial and Workforce Impact of Medication Errors in the Finnish Public Healthcare System: A Pilot Study.Health services insights · 2026Article
- Prescribing Errors in Iraqi Intensive and Cardiac Care Units: A Qualitative Investigations of Pharmacists' Perceptions, Determining Factors, Outcomes and Management Strategies.Journal of multidisciplinary healthcare · 2026Article
- Opioid Room of Horrors: a simulation approach to strengthen drug administration safety.BMJ open quality · 2025Article
- Multidisciplinary Delphi study validated variables for calculating cost of medication errors in the Sri Lankan context.BMJ open quality · 2025Article
- Article
57 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
1. To understand medication errors and to identify preventive strategies, we need to classify them and define the terms that describe them. 2. The four main approaches to defining technical terms consider etymology, usage, previous definitions, and the Ramsey-Lewis method (based on an understanding of theory and practice). 3. A medication error is 'a failure in the treatment process that leads to, or has the potential to lead to, harm to the patient'. 4. Prescribing faults, a subset of medication errors, should be distinguished from prescription errors. A prescribing fault is 'a failure in the prescribing [decision-making] process that leads to, or has the potential to lead to, harm to the patient'. The converse of this, 'balanced prescribing' is 'the use of a medicine that is appropriate to the patient's condition and, within the limits created by the uncertainty that attends therapeutic decisions, in a dosage regimen that optimizes the balance of benefit to harm'. This excludes all forms of prescribing faults, such as irrational, inappropriate, and ineffective prescribing, underprescribing and overprescribing. 5. A prescription error is 'a failure in the prescription writing process that results in a wrong instruction about one or more of the normal features of a prescription'. The 'normal features' include the identity of the recipient, the identity of the drug, the formulation, dose, route, timing, frequency, and duration of administration. 6. Medication errors can be classified, invoking psychological theory, as knowledge-based mistakes, rule-based mistakes, action-based slips, and memory-based lapses. This classification informs preventive strategies.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.