Medication Safety Flashcards
7 cards from real CPHT practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Medication Safety flashcards as text
Which system-level safety intervention physically prevents a wrong drug or dose from being selected?
Answer: Forcing function
A forcing function creates a physical or system barrier that makes it impossible to proceed with an incorrect action (e.g., unique connectors for epidural vs. IV tubing).
A technician accidentally fills a prescription with the 10 mg tablet instead of the 100 mg tablet. At what point in the dispensing process should this error ideally be caught?
Answer: During pharmacist final verification
The pharmacist's final verification is the last safety checkpoint before dispensing, designed to catch errors like incorrect strength selection.
Which metric does ISMP use to categorize the severity of a medication error?
Answer: NCC MERP index categories A–I
ISMP uses the NCC MERP Index for Categorizing Medication Errors, which ranges from Category A (no error) through Category I (death).
Why should leading zeros always be used but trailing zeros never used on medication labels?
Answer: To prevent 10-fold dosing errors
A trailing zero (e.g., 1.0 mg misread as 10 mg) and absence of a leading zero (e.g., .5 mg misread as 5 mg) can both cause 10-fold dosing errors.
What is the primary purpose of a Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) in pharmacy?
Answer: Proactively identify where a process could fail before errors happen
FMEA is a prospective risk analysis tool that identifies potential failure points in a process before errors occur.
A child receives an adult dose of acetaminophen due to a weight-based calculation error. Which pediatric safety guideline would have helped prevent this?
Answer: Using mg/kg dosing with weight verification
Pediatric dosing should always be calculated using mg/kg with verified patient weight to prevent under- or overdosing.
Which action by a pharmacy technician constitutes a dispensing error of omission?
Answer: Not including a required auxiliary label
Omitting a required auxiliary label (e.g., 'Take with food' or 'May cause drowsiness') is a dispensing error of omission that can lead to patient harm.