Leveraging HFACS to Understand Medication Error in Emergency Medical Services (EMS)

Abstract

Medication errors are prevalent in EMS settings, and can occur in as frequently as 21% of patient calls (Vilke et al.., 2006), significantly impacting patient care. However, even with the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS), a widely accepted human factors error taxonomy, there is currently no widely accepted systematic method for organizing and understanding medication errors and its antecedents. The current effort seeks to synthesize the EMS medication error literature with the goal of extracting current themes and gaps to offer recommendations for which use of HFACS could to improve EMS medication error research. By leveraging HFACs and incorporating the emerging knowledge of EMS medication error, medication error can be better understood by practitioners and inform interventions aimed to target specific underlying issues.