Medication reconciliation in psychiatric hospitals: some reflections

Medication errors are one of the most common causes of harm in hospitalised patients, and these errors are often due to medication discrepancies at care transitions. Psychiatric hospitals have various characteristics that make medication reconciliation particularly challenging, such as: the length and number of admissions; the high number of care transitions; the difficulty of conducting a clinical interview with patients; the characteristics of psychoactive drugs; and segmentation in healthcare. In this paper, we present a series of real cases of medication discrepancies detected in our daily clinical practice in the pharmacy unit in order to illustrate the factors that aggravate the problem in psychiatric hospitals.