Abstract
Patient safety is considered as an essential feature of healthcare system. Many trials have been conducted in order to find ways to improve patient safety, and many reports indicate that medication errors pose a threat to patient safety.
 Thus, some studies have investigated the impact of bar code medication administration (BCMA) system on medication error reduction during the medication administration procedure.
 This systematic review (SR) reports the impact of BCMA system on reducing medication errors to improve patient safety; it also compares traditional medication administration with the BCMA system. The review concentrates on the effectiveness of BCMA technology on medication administration errors, and on the accuracy of medication administration. This review also focused on different designs of quantitative studies, as they are more effective at investigating the impact of the intervention than qualitative studies.
 The findings from this systematic review show various results depending on the nature of the hospital setting. Most of the studies agree that the BCMA system enhances compliance with the 'five rights’' requirement (right drug, right patient, right dose, right time and right route) of medication administration. In addition, BCMA technology identified medication error types that could not be identified with the traditional approach which is applying the 'five rights' of medication administration. The findings of this systematic review also confirm the impact of BCMA system in reducing medication error, preventing adverse events and increasing the accuracy of the medication administration rate. However, BCMA technology did not consistently reduce the overall errors of medication administration.
 Keyword: Patient Safety, Impact, BCMA, eMAR
Highlights
Losing someone is a traumatic and overwhelming event, yet realising that their death was not inevitable makes it even more upsetting
Many trials have been conducted in order to find ways to improve patient safety, and many reports indicate that medication errors pose a threat to patient safety
The findings of this systematic review confirm the impact of bar code medication administration (BCMA) system in reducing medication error, preventing adverse events and increasing the accuracy of the medication administration rate
Summary
Losing someone is a traumatic and overwhelming event, yet realising that their death was not inevitable makes it even more upsetting. These factors can be eliminated by applying the ‘five rights’ of medication administration: right patient, right drug, right dose, right route (Jones 2009) Despite these rights, medication administration errors still occur, often because the 'five rights' are procedural goals for safe medication administration practice; they focus on the performance of the individual practitioner but do not consider the multidisciplinary efforts in the medication administration process (Grissinger 2010). The medical team does not check the five rights accurately, and this can occur if there is poor lighting, an insufficient number of staff, badly designed medical devices, handwritten information, missing trailing zeroes (for example 2.0 vs 2), and missing initial zeros (for example .2, rather than 0.2) If these orders are not understood correctly, it could result in doses being ten times higher; drug labels could be confused; and in ineffective double-check system for drugs subject to a high alert, which should be independently checked (Grissinger 2010). This study has been designed to consider the effectiveness of BCMA in preventing medication errors
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