Abstract
Background and Objectives: To speed up the cure and revival process and prevent adverse medical events, dentists must be careful enough in writing a prescription and be familiar with the prescription basics such as: dosage form, dose, drug interaction etc. Hence, the health services insurance prescriptions of dentists in Tabriz City were assessed for medication errors.
Materials and Methods: Six hundred and sixty six prescriptions were randomly selected from the Iranian Health Services Insurance prescriptions in Tabriz City to retrospectively identify dosage form, drug name, dosage, interval, rout of administration, and drug interactions.
Results: There were errors in 98.05% of the studied prescriptions. 94.9% of the prescriptions were shown error in drug name. Error in rout of administration, error in interval of consumption, and error in dosage was 92.8%, 72.4%, and 60.8%, respectively. Drug interaction and mistakes in dosage form was observed in 27.6% and 5.3% of the prescriptions, respectively.
Conclusion: Bearing in mind that there were errors in most of the prescriptions, putting more emphasis on rational prescribing & prescription writing in the curriculum plan and continuing education programs for dentistry training can reduce the medication errors. Financial penalty is an extra effective strategy for this purpose.