A medication error is an event that is posing serious threat to the society nowadays. It may lead to an inappropriate medication use or patient harm.[1] There may be several reasons or factors relating to these errors which should be ruled out to bring a change in the healthcare practice. These errors on the other hand can also be considered as a failure in the treatment process. The errors could lead to various problems which include decreased therapeutic efficacy, added workload and financial burden, litigation problems and most importantly toxic effects in patients. The studies conducted previously state, that prescription errors are the commonly occurring errors because of irrational and inappropriate prescribing, under prescribing, and …show more content…
Assessment of perception: This section contained 5 questions that could help in the assessment of public’s perception about medication errors. This section was aimed to test the understanding of the topic among the public. Assessment of attitude: This section contained 5 questions which aimed to assess how the public felt about medication errors and its consequences. Assessment of awareness: Public awareness of medication errors was established in two ways: whether they had ever heard of medication error and whether they considered medical error, a serious threat to public safety. The questionnaire was validated by conducting a pilot study among 40 randomly selected respondents from Kerala to assess the quality of the questionnaire. There were certain changes that were made to the questionnaire which included: addition of questions, changes made in the order of questions, changes made in the options, addition of options such as all, others, do not know, simplified questions. Scores were allowed for each question based on the options provided and they were ranked according to the closeness to the answers that would provide the best knowledge and