Medication Errors in Ethiopia: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Abstract Background: The caution of medication prescription and administration are the main physician and nursing services though there was no study to show medication error at the nation level in Ethiopia. Therefore, we estimated the national prevalence of medication errors. Methods: A systematic review of studies searched in PubMed, Scopus, African Journal of Online, and Google Scholar was done. Newcastle-Ottawa quality assessment scale was used to assess the quality status of the included studies. We employed Galbraith plot and Egger’s regression test to assess publication bias. The national prevalence of medication errors was estimated using a random-effects model meta-analysis. Moreover, subgroup analysis and meta-regression analyses were done to explore the reason of statistical heterogeneity.Results: A total of 14 studies with 5,552 administered medications and 5,661 prescription sheets were included. The overall prevalence of medication error in Ethiopia was 57.6% (95% CI: 46.2, 69.0). The pooled burden of medication administration and prescription error was 58.4% (95% CI: 51.4, 65.5) and 55.8% (95% CI: 27.0, 84.6), respectively. Omission error (38%), wrong dose (38.5%), and the wrong combination of drugs (28.7%) were highly reported types of prescription errors, whereas missed doses (57.0%), technical errors (47.0%), wrong time (35.0%), and wrong dose (30.0%) were frequently observed medication administration errors.Conclusions: Medication errors were very common in Ethiopian hospitals whereby at least one out of two medications were wrongly prescribed and administered. Our review provided a shred of up-to-date evidence for clinicians, regional, and national healthcare policymakers to appraise and improve the quality of hospitals’ inpatient care.Trail registration: The protocol is registered in the Prospero database with a registration number of CRD42019138125.