Summary of research The dispensing errors most commonly occur among pharmacists

Summary of research The dispensing errors most commonly occur among pharmacists who are responsible for dispensing. The errors can lead to death or serious injuries. According to our opinion the reducing or preventing dispensing errors will lead to safe and improving the quality of life for both patients and pharmacists. A cross sectional questionnaire paper will be distributed between pharmacists in all Qassim hospital and the questionnaire will focus attention on determine the causes and contributing factor to dispensing errors through measuring the acute and chronic fatigue and intershift recovery by valid fatigue scale and assess the degree of sleepiness between pharmacists. Key word: Dispensing, Errors, Fatigue, Shift, pharmacists Introduction The dispensing of medication is one of the most important functions of pharmacists, the dispensing process know as making and providing medicine to specific person according to specific prescription (Naybour, Prescott& boyd, 2019). In each years more than 900 million medicine are dispensed by community pharmacy and hospital pharmacy (James et al., 2009). Many dispensing errors are made during any phase of medication dispensing, and the dispensing errors define as a disagreement between a prescription and medicine reach to patient (Cheung, Bouvy& Smet, 2009). Approximately more than 134341 dispensing errors occur annually in England and Wales (James et al., 2009). The medication errors cause sever injury to patients also more than 98000 patients died on each year as a result of medication errors (Bari, Khan& Rathone, 2016).Many causes and contributing factor for dispensing errors where reported in literature one of them, study conducted in 2016 determine that the fatigue, excessive workload, staff without knowledge and look- alike/ sound- alike medicine consider the major contributing factor to dispensing errors (Aldhwaihi, 2016).Fatigue has long been documented as a contributing factor to medication errors (Richter et al., 2016). Fatigue is feeling very tired and daily lack of energy, which has a negative effect on your quality of life (Watkins, 2010). In addition Research has shown that the clinicians with fatigue due to sleep deprivation are more prone to impair performance (Gaba DM & Howard SK, 2002). There are many studies have been conducted to study the fatigue level in healthcare, in study in 2011 by Barker and Nussbaum on 745 registered nurses it was found that the fatigue level were higher among nurse, and chronic fatigue was less than acute fatigue (Barker& Nussbaum, 2011). Another study have been conducted to study the association between fatigue and medication errors and have been demonstrated that 97.8% of medication errors result from fatigue due to excessive workload (Gorgich et al., 2016). Furthermore there is association between working for a long time more than 12 hour and fatigue as demonstrated by Martin (Martin, 2015). In addition there is a relationship between fatigue and intershift (state of mental and physical not back to normal condition since the previous shift and the beginning of the next shift), which effect safety of patients and healthcare performance especially the healthcare who working 12-hour shift (Martin, 2015).Long shift working considers another important contributing factor and causes to medication errors. A study by joint commission in 2014 found that the possibility of injury of medication errors will rise after working 8 hours continuously and it will be doublet after 12 hours working (Karen, 2014). The working for a long period of times also it is always associated with inadequate sleep and increase disease where the normal range of sleep for adult 7-8 hours at night (Caruso, 2013).Since the is no enough study done on pharmacists who play an important role in hospital by monitoring the supply of all medication used in the hospital and ensuring the safe and effective used of medication. Because of this the study will determine the dispensing error, causes and contributing factor to dispensing errors and it will measure the level of fatigue between pharmacists by using fatigue scale and sleepiness finally it will determine the impact of long shift and how can results in increase dispensing errors. Aim of study This study sets out:1- To evaluate the level of acute and chronic fatigue and intershift recovery among pharmacists.2- To assess the sleepiness between pharmacists. 3- To determine the causes and contributing factor of dispensing errors.4- To investigate the association between fatigue and shift work. Research Design and Method • Overview of study design:A cross sectional questionnaire paper. Will distributed between pharmacists in all Alqassim hospital including King Fahad Specialist Hospital, King Saud Hospital, Dr.Sulaiman Alhabib Hospital and AlQassim National Hospital. The number of sample size will include all the pharmacists agree to fill questionnaire during the study period.• Data collection tool:The data will be collected by questionnaire paper that includes five sections:Section1: include four questions about current pharmacists jobSection2: include OFER (Occupational Fatigue Exhaustion Recovery) scale it will be use to measure the level of fatigue between pharmacists and contain 15 questions, the first five question to evaluate chronic fatigue, second five questions to evaluate acute fatigue and the last five question to evaluate the intershift recovery.Section3: to assess the degree of sleepiness among pharmacists including a nine-degree start from extremely alert and end with very sleepy.Section4: include two questions about leading cause and most contributing factor to dispensing errors.Section5: include general demographic information.• Data analysis: