medicatieveiligheidsproblemen

Medication safety is the discipline that aims to prevent harm from medicines and improve the effectiveness of pharmacotherapy. It covers the entire lifecycle of a medicine, from development and prescribing to dispensing, administration, monitoring, and disposal. The goal is to reduce medication errors and adverse drug events while ensuring patients receive the right drug, at the right dose, for the right indication.

Common medication-related errors include prescribing mistakes (incorrect drug, dose, or route), dispensing errors (wrong drug, packaging, or labeling), administration mistakes (missed doses, wrong timing, incorrect route), and monitoring failures (inadequate therapeutic drug monitoring or failure to identify adverse reactions). Look-alike/sound-alike drugs and illegible handwriting have historically contributed to errors; these risks are mitigated by electronic prescribing, standardized protocols, barcoding, and other safety checks.

Contributing factors include workload, interruptions, incomplete patient information, polypharmacy, and patient-specific factors such as age, renal or hepatic impairment, and cognitive status. High-risk settings include hospitals, long-term care facilities, and home care during transitions between care environments.

Safeguards include electronic health records with decision support, computerized physician order entry, medication reconciliation at transitions, duplicate-therapy checks, pharmacist review, and patient education. System-level approaches emphasize reporting near-misses and adverse events to learn and prevent recurrence, and participation in pharmacovigilance programs.

Improvement relies on collaboration among prescribers, pharmacists, nurses, and patients, continuous learning, and international initiatives such as the World Health Organization’s Medication Without Harm program, which seeks to reduce preventable medication-related harm worldwide.