Patient Safety in the Process of Pharmacotherapy Carried Out by Nurses—A Polish–Slovak Prospective Observational Study

Abstract

Pharmacotherapy, i.e., the use of medicines for combating a disease or its symptoms, is one of the crucial elements of patient care. Nursing workloads in the pharmacotherapy process prove that nurses spend 40% of their work on the management of medications. This study was aimed at the determination and comparison of safety levels at the nurse-managed stage of the pharmacotherapy process in Poland and Slovakia by identifying the key risk factors which directly affect patient safety. The study involved a group of 1774 nurses, of whom 1412 were from Poland and 362 were from Slovakia. The original Nursing Risk in Pharmacotherapy (acronym: NURIPH) tool was used. The survey questionnaire was made available online and distributed to nurses. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was 0.832. Nurses from Slovakia most often, i.e., for six out of nine factors (items: one, five, six, seven, eight, and nine), assessed the risk factors as “significant risk (3)”, and Polish nurses most often, i.e., for as many as eight out of nine risk factors (items: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and nine), assessed the risk factors as “very significant (5)”. It has been found that the safety of the pharmacotherapy process is assessed by Polish nurses to be much lower than by Slovak nurses.