Hospital Pharmacist
Vol 9 No 3 p61-62
March 2002

News summary

Storing patients' drugs in bedside lockers cuts errors

A study by pharmacists at Wirral Hospitals NHS Trust and reported in The Pharmaceutical Journal (2 March, p274) has shown that giving drugs to patients from individual bedside lockers is associated with fewer medication errors by nurses when compared with the traditional method of giving drugs from a general ward drug trolley.

A baseline error rate of 10 per cent dropped to 2.5 per cent when drugs were administered from patients' bedside lockers. The type of errors that occurred also differed. With the traditional method, there were 78 instances of omitted drugs, of which 42 per cent had been available from the drug trolley but not located. With the bedside lockers, 26 omission errors occurred, with 8 per cent of the omitted drugs being in the lockers.