Reduction of reconciliation errors in chronic pediatric patients through an educational strategy

Background: Medication reconciliation errors, also known as unintentional discrepancies, are frequent during admission, especially in chronic patients, and have an impact on safety. Educational interventions can be a reduction strategy. Material and methods: Quasi-experimental study, before-after design. Participants were chronic patients admitted into hospitalization services. Medication reconciliation was conducted at admission. The intervention consisted of a training to each prescribing physician with study contents and printed educational material. To study the association between intervention and change of frequency of unintentional discrepancies was made a logistic regression model, adjusting for selected variables. Results: A sample of 54 patients was studied in each stage. In the first stage it was observed that 42.6% of patients had at least one unintentional discrepancy. After intervention the proportion of patients with at least one unintentional discrepancy decreased to 24.1% (p = 0.041). In both stages, omission was the main category of unintentional discrepancy. The significant reduction after the intervention is maintained by controlling for variables such as emergency admission and pre-admission service. Conclusions: Incidence of unintentional discrepancies in admission is high in chronic hospitalized patients and can be reduced through an educative strategy.