New study highlights difficulty of spotting pharmacy prescription errors

New research has highlighted the need for more assistance to help pharmacists root out avoidable dispensing errors.

A team at the University of Bath supported by Pharmacy Research UK has conducted a study aiming to investigate the effect of different mental workloads on detecting errors. Pharmacists were given 50 medicines to check against realistic prescriptions in 25 minutes, with five deliberate errors secretly mixed into the batch, reports the Pharmaceutical Journal.

When subjected to distractions such as requiring participants to memorise numbers or unexpected interruptions, only 35 percent of the staff were able to detect all five hidden errors.

The report therefore recommended a number of steps to help eliminate mistakes, such as reducing distractions, offering more control over workloads and ensuring safety-critical tasks do not occur when concentration is lowest, such as after breaks.

Author Hannah Family said: "Published data suggest dispensing errors only occur three percent of the time, which suggests that for visual checking it's very hard for humans to identify errors."

This comes at a time when the government is seeking new ways of involving pharmacies more centrally in the provision of NHS care, making it an important problem to solve.