EVALUATION OF FACTORS CONTRIBUTING TO MEDICATION ERROS AMONG NURSES WORKING AT MBAGATHI DISTRICT HOSPITAL

Kenya healthcare policies provide that patient’s dignity be observed by ensuring medical safety practices are observed. In this case, medication errors are a concern for both healthcare professionals as well as patients. The main aim of this study was to evaluate factors contributing to medication safety practices among nurses working at Mbagathi District Hospital. To achieve this objective, the study investigated types of medication errors committed by nurses, established actual factors contributing to occurrence of medication errors, among nurses and finally established the barriers to reporting of medication errors among nurses working at Mbagathi District Hospital. The study adopted descriptive design study where data was collected from 121 nurses working in medical, surgical, paediatric, maternity and outpatients using structured self-administered questionnaires after a pilot study showed validity and reliability of the research instrument. Basically, to ensure that the sample was representative, respondents were stratified in to 6 strata to ensure all departments are represented and simple random was used to select the wards and participants. The data collected was cleaned and analysis was done using scientific package for social scientist (SPSS) version 20.