Discussion
According to the clinical risk management theory, risk
identification is the first step and fundamental to manage
as otherwise any strategy to reduce risk may be inappropriate
(Sandars 2005). We used a direct observation
approach to assess the medication error rate and found
high rates of medication errors and non-adherence to guidelines, with violations occurring in about one of four
items overall. The direct observation method identified the
greatest number of drug-related problems (DRPs), while
incident report review identified the fewest (Meyer-Massetti
et al. 2011).