Knowledge and perception of medication errors among health care workers in Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital Zaria, Kaduna State, North-west Nigeria.

INTRODUCTION: Medication errors (MEs) are important, often overlooked forms of medical error that are associated with morbidity and mortality in health care settings. Among health care workers, knowledge, attitude and perception may affect reporting of MEs.

AIM: The aim of this study was to determine the level of knowledge and perception of MEs among health care workers in Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital, Zaria.

METHODOLOGY: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 138 health care workers selected randomly through a stratified sampling. Their responses were collected using pre-tested, self-administered questionnaires and analysed using the Statsitical Package for the Social Sciences. The numerical variables were summarised as means and standard deviations, whereas categorical variables were presented as frequencies and percentages. The Chi-square test was used to test for associations at P < 0.05.

RESULTS: All the respondents heard of MEs and up to 108 (78.3%) correctly defined them. While only 121 (87.7%) respondents had fair to good knowledge about MEs, all of them had good perception of them. Major types of MEs known by the respondents were knowledge-based errors (79.7%), rule-based errors (52.9%), action-based errors (67.4%) and memory-based errors (55.8%). The causes of MEs identified were communication problems (88.4%), poor organizational knowledge transfer (63.8%), heavy workload (80.4%) and not reading instructions carefully (63.0%). There was no statistically significant association between the level of knowledge on MEs and sociodemographic characteristics of the respondents.

CONCLUSION: Knowledge and perceptions of MEs were good among our respondents. Adequate mechanism (s) should be put in place to encourage the reporting of MEs whenever they occur to promote patient safety and improve health outcomes.