Medication reconciliation for patients after their discharge from intensive care unit to the hospital ward.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to determine whether the transition of care from the intensive care unit to the ward would pose a high risk for reconciliation errors. The primary outcome of this study was to describe and quantify the discrepancies and reconciliation errors. Secondary outcomes included classification of the reconciliation errors by type of medication error, therapeutic group of the drugs involved and grade of potential severity.

Methods: We conducted a retrospective observational study of reconciliated adult patients discharged from the Intensive Care Unit to the ward. Before a patient was discharged from the intensive care unit, their last intensive care unit's prescriptions were compared with their proposed medication list in the ward. The discrepancies between these were classified as justified discrepancies or reconciliation errors. Reconciliation errors were classified by type of error, potential severity, and therapeutic group.

Results: We found that 452 patients were reconciliated. At least one discrepancy was detected in 34.29% (155/452), and 18.14% (82/452) had at least one reconciliation errors. The most found error types were a different dose or administration route (31.79% [48/151]) and omission errors (31.79% [48/151]). High alert medication was involved in 19.20% of reconciliation errors (29/151).

Conclusions: Our study shows that intensive care unit to non-intensive care unit transitions are high-risk processes for reconciliation error. They frequently occur and occasionally involve high alert medication, and their severity could require additional monitoring or cause temporary harm. Medication reconciliation can reduce reconciliation errors.