Improving patient safety through identifying barriers to reporting medication errors among nurses: an integrative review

Abstract

Abstract Background: The aim of the third WHO challenge released in 2017 was to attain a global commitment to lessen the severity and to prevent medication-related harm by 50% within the next five years. To achieve this goal, comprehensive identification of barriers to reporting medication errors is imperative.Objective: This review aimed to identify studies that investigated barriers to reporting medication administration errors among nurses, systematically summarize the findings to make recommendations for improving error reporting, and for future investigation.Design: An integrative review Review methods: PubMed, Web of Science, EMBASE and the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) including Google scholar were searched to identify published studies on barriers to medication error reporting from January 2016 to December 2020. The reviewers independently assessed the quality of all the included studies using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT) version 2018.Results: Of the 10937 articles reviewed, 14 studies were included. The main themes and subthemes identified after the integration of results from qualitative and quantitative studies were; organizational barriers (inadequate reporting systems, management behavior, and unclear definition of medication error), and professional and individual barriers (fear of management/colleagues/lawsuit, individual reasons and inadequate knowledge of errors).Conclusion: It is not expected that nurses will freely report medication errors in a fearful, punitive, and blaming culture. Providing an enabling environment void of punitive measures and blame culture is imperative for nurses to report medication errors. To minimize the burden on nurses reporting medication errors, an effective, non-time consuming, and uncomplicated anonymous system is required. An open feedback system for motivating or rewarding nurses for reporting medication errors is imperative and will therefore increase the rate of error reporting. Policymakers, managers, and nurses should agree on a uniform definition of what constitutes medication error to enhance nurses' ability to report.