Prescription writing is one of the most important and basic skills. The components of a prescription should be clearly written, free of drug related omission (incomplete prescription), commission (incorrect information) and integration errors, without non-official abbreviations and fulfill the legal requirements of a prescription. Since errors of prescribing are the commonest form of avoidable medication errors, it is the most important target for improvement. Medication errors are an unfortunate reality in most healthcare practices. The judicious use of drugs begins with a correct prescription; but according to the survey there are more than 60% of all treatments containing errors. Study objectives are to identify and quantify the most frequent prescription errors in inpatient’s medical prescriptions, to minimize errors and to ensure the safe use of drugs. A Prospective Observational study was conducted in a tertiary care teaching hospital during 6 months period. Male patients are more during our study period. Majority of prescribing errors are in between 31 – 40 years of age. 131 prescribing errors were found, the majority of errors were due to drug interactions (33.58%) followed by dose not mentioned errors (32.01%). The most common causes of error were mistakes due to inadequate knowledge of the drug or the patient, lack of training or experience, fatigue, stress, high workload and inadequate communication between healthcare professionals. Universal changes such as standardizing the work processes, promoting effective team functioning, automated error surveillance, improve the number of working staff decreases the prescribing medication errors.
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