An opportunity for improvement with a medication reconciliation programme

Copyright © 2013 Ana Belén Jiménez-Muñoz et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribu-tion License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Medication reconciliation is priority in safety. Be-tween 54 % and 67 % of hospitalized patients have at least one unintended discrepancies (UDs) between phar-macological treatment of a hospital inpatient and treatment that they were previously taking at home. Quasi-experimental pre-post study performed. The objective is to assess the impact of an intervention aimed at decreasing UDs between medication prescrib-ed on admission and patient’s regular treatment. Pa-tients who were hospitalised for more than 24 hours and were undergoing treatment prior to admission which involved taking three or more medicines were included. The number of patients included was 331 and 3781 medicines were reconciled. The incidence of UDs decreased significantly from 7.24 % to 4.18%. Omission was the most common UD, with a significant decrease from 5.8 % to 3.4%. Respect to clinical im-pact, we observed that error type C (error reached patient without causing harm) predominates, how-ever, experienced a statistically significant decrease from 5.3 % to 2.4%