Medico-Legal Update

Medication errors are one of the most common medical incidents occurring in hospitals and are the major health events. This study aims to perform a meta-analysis of the effects of intervention on the avoidance errors in nurses and to provide basic data for evidence-based nursing practice.

CINAHL, PubMed, EMBASE, Ovid, the Cochrane Library and relevant articles published in January 1975 and in February 2018 were searched. Randomized controlled trial and non-randomized controlled trials were included. Risk of Bias and Risk of Bias Assessment tool for Non randomized Studies were used to evaluate quality of the selected studies. The random effects model was used considering various characteristics of the selected studies to calculate average effect size.

A total of 3538 studies were retrieved from five electronic databases, thirty studies of which were included in this study: five were randomized controlled trials and eight were non-randomized controlled trials. Interventions were medical devices and education intervention. Medical devices intervention was useful to directly reduce nurse medication administration errors (OR=0.64, 95% CI: 0.45 to 0.93. p=.020), and simulation education was effective in improving nurse medication knowledge (SMD=1.06, 95% CI: 0.07 to 2.05, p=.036).

The results of this study can be widely used as the bias for the selection of useful moderations to increase safety of patients at nursing sites.