Objectives: To describe the percentage of pediatric outpatient pharmacy prescriptions with
inappropriate prescribing identified by a pharmacist that resulted in a change to the prescription.
Secondary objectives include describing types of inappropriate prescribing errors,
prevalence of Institute of Safe Medication Practices high-alert medications, patient demographics,
prescriber origin, and prescription origin.
Methods: This retrospective outpatient prescription record review was approved by an institutional
review board and performed at an outpatient pharmacy located in an academic
teaching hospital. The study reviewed pediatric outpatient prescriptions for a 6-month period.
Prescriptions with prescribing errors were identified from pediatric prescriptions sent to the
problem queue and documented with appropriate pharmacist notes.
Results: This study demonstrated the impact of a dose checking procedure and pharmacist
interventions on pediatric prescriptions. Initial results show that 3% of all pediatric prescriptions
required a pharmacist intervention. Of these prescriptions, 50% resulted in a change
to the original prescription.
Conclusion: Weight-based dose checking in a pediatric outpatient pharmacy proactively prevents
potential adverse events among the pediatric population. Despite this study's limitations,
we believe that a pediatric dose checking procedure in community pharmacies will
reduce adverse events. Further study is warranted in this field.
© 2016 American Pharmacists Association®. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.