Barriers to Reporting Medication Errors in Iran: A Systematic Review

Introduction: Detection of errors is known as the basis for maintaining and improving patientsafety. In this regard, patient safety is a key priority in the health system. Reporting medicationerrors, in addition to preventing potential harm to the patient, is also considered as a valuableinformation source for preventing further similar mistakes in the future. Although, there aremany benefits and high ethical standards for medication error reports, nurses may have oftensome doubts in detecting errors for a patient in order to protect themselves from punishmentand administrative rules. Thus, paying attention to barriers of reporting and resolving them isessential to the possible extent. This review study has been conducted with the aim ofinvestigating the reasons why nurses refuse to report medication errors in Iran.Materials and Method: This review study was conducted by surveying the studies between1387-1393 using the keywords reporting medication errors, Iran, barriers to reporting, andsystematic review. All possible combinations of key words have been used in the databasessuch as Iran Medex, SID, Iran doc and Magiran using the Google search engine. Thesecombination were searched for according to Cochran's seven-step model regarding theinclusion criteria, including descriptive articles published in credited journals on the subjectof barriers of nurses to report medication errors and the exclusion criteria, including qualitativestudies, case reports, review studies, studies irrelevant to nurses’ medication errors, seminarsas well as joint studies with other members of the treatment team.Findings: From among 18 studies retrieved, a number of eight studies were excluded from thestudy regarding the exclusion criteria, and finally 10 articles were analyzed. After analysis ofthe studies, reporting barriers were divided in three areas related to reporting, managementfactors, and fear from the reporting consequences.Conclusion: The results showed that the main barrier for not reporting medication errors isfear from managers and nurse educators’ inappropriate feedbacks as well as fear from financialand legal matters. Therefore, medication errors can be reduced by proper planning andmanagement, away from punishment and reprimands, encouragements such as financialrewards, vacation incentives and so on, along with academic and in-service training, andcreating a positive learning environment. Moreover, the implementation of a reporting errorsystem in which the personnel feel safe is among other duties of this field.

Keywords:

Barriers , Reporting , Medical Errors , Nurse , Iran , Review , Systematic