A Fuzzy Risk Analysis Approach to Improve Patient Safety by Risks Prioritization in Medication Dispensing

Abstract: Patient safety is an important health issue. It is a priority for health care improvement throughout the globe. It can be improved by reducing the occurrence of medical errors. One type of medical errors which occur often is medication errors. When medication error harms the patient, not only it effects the patient's health but also increases the costs to the system (government). To improve patient safety effectively, one should systematically analyse and assess the risks for medication errors and determine the possible causes. The frequency of occurrence of medication errors is high in the drug dispensing process. In this paper a FIS risk analysis model is developed to analyse and prioritise the risks in a pharmacy drug dispensing process. The model uses a bow-tie analysis and a fuzzy inference system to analyse and prioritize the risks by calculating the risk score. Proper mitigation plans are applied to control the risk events based on the risk score and hence patient safety can be achieved by reducing the number of risk events i.e., medication errors.