Abstract

Background and Aim: The emergency department is considered the most important hospital ward due to exposure to many patients, especially seriously ill patients. As a result, medical errors in this ward are very important and can affect all services and treatments received by the patients. Therefore, this study aimed to prediction of the medical errors in the emergency departments. Methods: This descriptive study was carried out in the first half of 2018. The study population consisted of physicians and nurses selected from 4 military hospitals of Tehran, Iran. The study consisted of two phases: Delphi technique was used in the first phase in order to identify the medical errors, and the prioritization of identified errors in the second phase was used by a researcher-made questionnaire and the TOPSIS technique. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS 21.0 and TOPSIS software. Results: The medical errors of the studied emergency department were categorized into 6 main groups: diagnostic errors, medication errors, laboratory errors, care and nursing errors, medical equipment errors, and radiological errors. Medication errors (with CL= 0.879) and radiological errors (with CL= 0) had the first and last priorities of the medical errors in the studied emergency department, respectively. Conclusion: Regarding the weight of medication errors of the studied emergency department, it is essential for managers to provide strategies to reduce them through correcting processes, providing appropriate training, and developing appropriate guidelines. © 2018 Baqiyatallah University of Medical Sciences. All Rights Reserved.