Medication Safety in Patients under 18 Years Old; a Retrospective Study based on Iraqi Pharmacovigilance Center Database

Abstract

Medication safety is an important part of the comprehensive patient safety term. Medication safety is gaining more attention as the World Health Organization set the goal of decreasing medication harm by (50%) for the next 5 years when launching the third global challenge. Studying medication safety in the risk groups such as young ages, children are crucial to learn more about the effect of medicines in this risk group since they are not included in the clinical trials. Adverse drug reaction is defined as any harm resulted from the drug itself during medical process journey, while medication errors are any harm resulted from the treatment process rather than the drug or it is the result of the failure in a step of the treatment process and by that it came clear that adverse drug reaction in non-preventable event while medication error is preventable one. The objectives of this study are to find the preventable medication errors from the Iraqi database of Adverse drug events in ages from neonatal to adolescent age. This study is a retrospective descriptive study conducted using the Iraqi pharmacovigilance center database. The study included reports that were received by the Iraqi pharmacovigilance center from 1^st of January 2014 until the 1^st of January 2020. In this study, the total number of reports included was 2344. The type of medication involved, type of adverse event, type of error and

Received: 5/ 3/ 2020

Accepted: 14/6 /2020