Elaboration and Validation of the Medication Prescription Safety Checklist.
Aline de Oliveira Meireles Pires, Maria Beatriz Guimarães Ferreira, Kleiton Gonçalves do Nascimento and 3 others
PMID 28793128WHAT IT FOUND
A new checklist for auditing medication prescriptions showed excellent agreement between two independent nurses.
It reliably flags common errors like missing patient IDs, abbreviations, and unclear infusion speeds, providing a practical tool for safety monitoring.
Key findings
01The checklist demonstrated excellent inter-rater reliability, with two nurses agreeing perfectly on all items in the first part (identification) and showing high intraclass correlation coefficients (0.85 to 1.00) for most items in the second part (medicines).
02The final tool consists of 22 items covering prescription identification and medicine details, designed to score compliance from 0 to 100, where higher scores indicate better adherence to safety recommendations.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The study only tested reliability between two raters on 27 prescriptions, which is a small sample size. The checklist was validated only in a specific hospital context in Brazil, so its applicability to other settings or countries is unproven. The study did not test whether using the checklist actually reduces patient harm or medication errors in practice (predictive validity).
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume this checklist has been proven to reduce medication errors or improve patient outcomes. The study only showed that two nurses can use it consistently to identify prescription features; it did not test whether using it actually prevents harm.