Abstract
Recently, the role of pharmacists has been expanding to include providing direct care to patients. To facilitate this expansion, one option is that non-pharmacists perform some drug-related tasks under the supervision of a pharmacist. Therefore, at our hospital we adopted Personal Digital Assistance (PDA), which is based on the electronic recording of drug preparation steps, and an audit support system, which is based on the weight of a drug. This study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of the PDA and audit support system in avoiding drug preparation errors and reducing the number of dispensing incidents among pharmacists and non-pharmacists. We categorized these events into 3 groups: drug preparation errors prevented by PDA (PDA_NG), drug preparation errors prevented by pharmacist audit (PreDEs), and dispensing incidents (DIs). The results showed that the rate of PDA_NG was significantly higher among pharmacists than non-pharmacists (P < 0.01). When a PDA was used in drug preparation, PreDEs were not significantly different between pharmacists and non-pharmacists (P = 0.69). The types of PDA_NG were dispensing the wrong dosage form and dispensing the wrong drug. Ten DIs occurred when the audit support system was not used, but none occurred when it was used. Drug counting errors accounted for 70％ of the DIs. The use of a PDA in drug preparation by non-pharmacists was associated with a decrease in the number of drug preparation errors. In this study, we clearly demonstrated that a PDA helps to prevent errors in drug preparation by non-pharmacists.
