Drug-related problems and their clinical interventions in a Ghanaian teaching hospital

Background: Errors occur frequently in the use of medicines. Pharmacists play a key role in error identification and make appropriate interventions as they work with other healthcare professionals. These error recovery roles of pharmacists contribute to patient safety. This study was to evaluate the clinical interventions made to drug-related problems at a tertiary care setting. Method: This involved a retrospective review of clinical intervention reports submitted by pharmacists working over the period January 2011 to December 2013. Results: The 24 pharmacists submitted 529 handwritten reports; of these, 448 reports had complete data. The most frequently reported drugs with error were warfarin (9.5%), potassium chloride (6.0%) and potassium citrate (5.5%). The pharmacists made 1019 clinical interventions and recommendations. The average intervention per report was 2.5 (S.D ± 0.67). The interventions and recommendations made were categorised as drug regimen change (76.1%), monitoring required (13.0%), communication (5.4%), counselling required (5.0%) and adverse drug reporting (0.6%). Majority (90.5%) of the recommendations and interventions made by pharmacists were accepted and implemented. Monitoring-required based interventions were significantly more likely to be accepted (130 vs 38; p <0.0001). Conclusion: Pharmacists played a role in drug error recovery and prevented medication errors from reaching patients. These error mitigation efforts of pharmacists can serve as a priority in patient safety strategy.