Associação entre discrepâncias medicamentosas e o tempo de internação na Clínica Cirúrgica em um Hospital Universitário

Abstract

Drug reconciliation is a process of quality assurance programs for care, leading to the detection of medication errors, called in this context, by medication discrepancies. Thus, considering the scarcity of data in the literature, this research aimed to verify the association between drug discrepancies at hospital admission and length of stay in surgical patients at a teaching hospital. This is a retrospective cohort study. Study participants were all inpatients in the surgical clinic who had their Best Possible Medication History (MHPM) prepared by a clinical pharmacist, from 2014 to 2018. The data sources were the patient's pharmacotherapeutic and electronic medical records. In the surgical clinic, the average length of hospital stay for the group exposed to the drug discrepancy was 11 days (SD = 23), while in the unexposed group it was 10,5 days (SD = 38), p = 0.352. This result indicates that there is no association between drug discrepancies at hospital admission and length of stay. However, it can be inferred that there was an increase in the length of hospital stay in patients who had drug discrepancies and who had comorbidities, with statistically significant results, both for adults and for the elderly.