PA Advisory: Preventing Harm Associated with Patients’ Personal Medications

Employing proactive strategies to address situations in which patients may bring in their own medications can help prevent potential harm to these patients, concludes a June 2012 Pennsylvania Patient Safety Advisory article. According to the article, Pennsylvania facilities submitted 879 medication error reports from July 1, 2004, through January 31, 2011, to the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority involving patients taking their own medications while in a hospital. Categorization of the reports by harm score shows that 77.7% of the events reached the patient and 2.1% of the events resulted in patient harm. Almost 300 different medications were mentioned in the reports, and 18.7% of the reports revealed that patients took multiple medications.