OBJECTIVES: To explore the methods and behavioural tools in which community pharmacists utilize patient counselling to prevent medication incidents. The findings of this qualitative, multi-incident analysis will substantiate the strongholds in which pharmacists mitigate errors and the role of patient education in encouraging health literacy and continuity of care.,METHODS: A multi-incident analysis was performed on medication incidents reported to the Community Pharmacy Incident Reporting Program (CPhIR) developed by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices Canada. The keywords in the incident description included patient-counselling terminology, such as “identified”, “counsel”, “explain”, and “teach”. The incidents included in this analysis spanned from September 2014 to August 2015. They were then stratified thematically based on their modes of identification.,RESULTS: Of the 115 incidents that met the inclusion criteria, two emergent themes were identified: pharmacist-led and patient-led identification of medication incidents. The themes gave rise to further subthemes respectively, focussing on prescription reconciliation, therapy evaluation and clarification, storage education, patient identifier verification, and product demonstration. Reinforcement of safe medication use at the stage of patient counselling can also gear pharmacists towards patient-focused care and effective medication therapy management.,CONCLUSIONS: Community pharmacy practitioners can effectively identify near misses and medication incidents at the stage of patient counselling. Having a dialogue with patients at the point of care will not solely be helpful for the mitigation of errors, but also serve as a quality assurance of continuity of care.