PRESCRIPTION EVALUATION: POTENTIAL PROBLEMS THAT MAY INDUCE THE ERROR IN THE DISPENSATION OF MEDICINES Mônica Miyuki Takahashi, Juliana Cristina do Nascimento, Valter Luiz da Costa Junior, Luciane Maria Ribeiro Neto

Abstract

The objective was to identify potential problems related to prescription that could induce error or change in the dispensing of drugs in a community pharmacy. The study evaluated 4,608 prescriptions answered at a community pharmacy of a Social Center of São Paulo from 20/Mar to 18/Dec/2017, quantified and classified as handwritten or typed. The requirements assessed by both a pharmacy academic and a pharmacist were: patient identification, legibility, use of abbreviations, drug designation, dose expression and use of vague expressions. Of the 4,608 prescriptions evaluated, 3.1% did not meet any of the criteria. The main criterion of evaluation not met was the illegibility of the prescription (0.69%) and 95.7% of the problems were identified in handwritten prescriptions (52.4%). The potential problems identified in the prescriptions evaluated were related to the lack of patient identification, illegibility, the use of units of non-metric measures in the expression of doses, the use of vague expressions when defining the form of use, and the use of abbreviations. The illegibility of the prescription becomes relevant because of the possibility of inducing both the error and the change in the dispensing of the drug.