Study of Factors Affecting Medical Incident: 1. Dispensing

In recent years, medical institutions have taken a variety of measures to prevent medical incident. In addition, progress has been made toward the development of a fully automated system for the purpose of medicine dispensing. However, automating the dispensing, or having it replaced by artificial intelligence (AI) will not, eradicate human error. Thus, measures against human error will continue to serve as an important topic. Therefore, hospitals are required to improve the efficiency of the pharmacy department. For these purposes, attention has now shifted to Supply Processing and Distribution (SPD). In this study, we measured for the gaze of the pharmacist and SPD, and examined the factors affecting dispensing error; moreover, we examined prevention of the human error. In the results of the eye tracking, SPD members tended to spend a greater number of gaze time and gaze counts, for each medicine, on “medicines” and “picking lists,” than pharmacists. On the other hand, when pharmacists picking medicines, they performed various work operations in parallel, such as checking the prescription and looking the next shelf location. It was conjectured that SPD members had more clearly defined items to check when picking, compared to pharmacists. This may have possibly led to a lower chance of dispensing errors being introduced by SPD members. These results suggest that the process of selection is not a mandatory requirement of pharmacists during the action of dispensing. Instead, SPD members, pharmacy assistants, or automatic dispensing devices could serve as substitutes for picking. It is suggested that pharmacists should spend more time and effort on prescription inspection, medicines checking and dosing operations.