Exploring the role of guidelines in contributing to medication errors: a descriptive analysis of national patient safety incident data

Introduction: Clinical guidelines can contribute to medication errors but there is no overall understanding of how and where these occur. Objectives: We aimed to identify guideline-related medication errors reported via a national incident reporting system, and describe types of error, stages of medication use, guidelines, drugs, specialties and clinical locations most commonly associated with such errors. Methods: Retrospective analysis of reports to the National Reporting and Learning System for England and Wales. A hierarchical task analysis (HTA) was developed, describing expected practice when using guidelines. A free-text search was conducted of medication incident reports (2016–2021) using search terms related to common guidelines. All identified reports linked to moderate-severe harm or death, and a random sample of 5100 no/low-harm reports were coded to describe deviations from the HTA. A random sample of 500 cases were independently double-coded. Results: In total, 28,217 reports were identified, with 608 relating to moderate-severe harm or death. Fleiss’ kappa for interrater reliability was 0.46. Of the 5708 reports coded, 642 described an HTA step discrepancy (including four linked to a death), suggesting over 3200 discrepancies in the entire dataset of 28,217 reports. Discrepancies related to finding guidelines (n = 300 reports), finding information within guidelines (n = 166) and using information (n = 176). Discrepancies were most frequently identified for guidelines produced by a local organisation (n = 405), and most occurred during prescribing (n = 277) or medication administration (n = 241). Conclusion: Difficulties finding and using information from clinical guidelines contribute to thousands of prescribing and medication administration incidents, some of which are associated with substantial patient harm.