Assessment of poorly written prescriptions that reach a community pharmacy / Evaluación del número de recetas mal cumplimentadas que llegan a una farmacia comunitaria

A great amount of prescriptions poorly written, containing administrative errors, must be corrected in the pharmacy before being invoiced to the Spanish National Health Service. Objective: This study was designed to assess the number of prescriptions with such errors and the time spent to correct them, in order to gather information to help the pharmacy owner to improve the organization of the different tasks that have to be done in the pharmacy. Methods: All the prescriptions filled during an hour on three consecutive days were taken aside to be analyzed later. Time spent in the correction of the met administrative errors was measured. Results: 64% of all of the analyzed prescriptions contained at least one error. More errors were found in hand-written prescriptions (86%) than in computer-produced prescriptions (33%). The most common error was the one related to the prescription date (100% of all the erroneous prescriptions). According to these data, we can estimate that to correct these errors 15.25 working hours per month are needed.