Abstract
Aims: Medication faults, broadly defined as any error in the advising, distributing, or management of a treatment, nevertheless whether such mistakes lead to confrontational penalties or not, are the single most inevitable cause of patient maltreatment. Incidences of medication error rates vary widely, as a result of the variety of altered study methods and descriptions used. Several thousand individuals are dying in the world because of the prescription errors every year, at the same time these errors cost billions of dollars annually. This study was conducted in the department of Pharmacy Practice, College of Clinical Pharmacy, King Faisal University, Al-Ahsa, Saudi Arabia from 1st October 2010 to 31st December 2011, to investigate the prescriptions regarding errors.
Materials and Methods: The prescriptions were collected from different hospitals of Eastern region of Saudi Arabia and analyzed in the department of Pharmacy Practice College of Clinical Pharmacy Al-Ahsa. The information in the prescriptions was evaluated statistically.
Results: A total of 500 prescriptions were processed. In evaluation it was found that out of 500 prescriptions were having fatal errors like age (4.6%), weight (98.8%), Diagnosis (30%), Dosage (14.6%), were not declared. Along with that a number of errors and inconsistencies were noticed in the prescriptions studied.
Conclusion: There is need of a comprehensive review of the government's control system on prescription error in Al-Ahsa, Saudi Arabia.