Comparison of Performance of Pharmacists and Nurses in Checking Drugs that Patients have Brought to Hospital on Admission

With the introduction of the Diagnosis Procedure Combination (DPC) into the medical service fee system,the number of hospitals in which drugs brought by patients on admission are used during hospitalization has been increasing.In this situation,it is considered very important to check the drugs that patients have brought to hospital on admission for risk management purposes.While it has been reported that the checking of drugs by pharmacists is an effective way of avoiding the risk of adverse drug reactions,nurses are also involved in this task in many hospitals.To our knowledge,however,no studies have been conducted to compare the thoroughness of checks carried out by pharmacists and nurses.In the present study,we retrospectively evaluated the performance of pharmacists and nurses in checking the drugs that patients had brought to the Nagoya University Hospital on admission in the third week of June 2008.We investigated whether essential information including drug trade name,content,dosage and administration were checked or not using an electronic medical chart system.Both pharmacists and nurses recorded drug trade names correctly but there were significant deficiencies in the recording of content,dosage and administration by nurses in checking drugs,in comparison with pharmacists.These findings suggest that the checking of drugs that patients have brought to hospital on admission should be done by pharmacists for best risk management.