Detection of potential prescription errors of carboplatin by pharmaceutical validation

All failures in some of the pharmacotherapy processes could be a potential risk to make mistakes that could to provoke damages in the patient. Thus, all service applying a cytostatic therapy to its patients must to establish a validation procedure of processes, beginning by prescription. In present paper an analysis of behavior of this process in the prescriptions was made including the carboplatin, cytostatic agent whose adverse effects are in general frequent, moderately significant and whose doses must to be adjusted taking into account the estimated clearance and the area under curve. The aim of present paper was to conduct a retrospective and descriptive study to identify the deficiencies during the pharmaceutical validation of this drug, included in the schemes of chemotherapy treatment in patients presenting with lung cancer. A total of 45 medical prescriptions were selected from patients aged over 51 with a similar behavior in both sexes where the non-small cells lung cancer was predominant, prevailing the error without type B damage (64) followed by error without type C damage (21). The potential type A errors were present in 26 opportunities; in eight of them the area under the curve was not signaled and in 18 there was not a dose change during the different cycles. We conclude that the pharmaceutical validation process is essential to avoid that the errors in prescription to reach patient