Authors
1 www.mui.ac.ir
2 www.khuisf.ac.ir
Abstract
Introduction: Patient safety has long been a major concern for healthcare professionals. Today, hospitals
should provide patient safety in order to gain accreditation. Among patient safety issues, medication error
rate has been considered as a major indicator of healthcare quality. The different aspects of medication
error are not clearly known and the nurses are the main source of knowledge in this field. Therefore, the
researcher decided to study the experiences of nurses who have been faced with a medication error in
order to clarify the various aspects of this phenomenon. It is through the exact identification of this
phenomenon that it can be managed.
Method: In the present study, a phenomenological qualitative approach was used. Participants in this
study were nurses working in hospitals of Isfahan and had experienced medication error. Purposive
sampling was adopted in the study and sample size was dependent on the data saturation. A total of 10
participants were chosen. Data collection was carried out through unstructured interviews and analysis
through Colaizzi’s Method.
Results: From the findings of this study, six main themes expressing participants’ experiences emerged.
The six main themes include: The context of error, the error range, negligence, the consequence of error,
concealment of error, and reporting of error.
Conclusion: Nurses report their errors when they feel safe and do not see harmful results for them.
Therefore, hospitals should review their policies on error reporting to ensure they actively encourage
nurses to report medication errors, and to support a blame-free culture in the organization and a systembased
approach to deal with the error.
Keywords
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