According to a recent Reuters report, “Patients Rarely Told About Medication Errors: Study,” frequent medication errors occur in hospital settings, and patients are often unaware of these errors.
Image Credit: Olivier Le Queinec via Dreamstime
Key points from the article:
- Medication errors from over 500 hospitals were studied.
- Approximately 840,000 errors were reported over a 6-year period.
- The most common type of error was that of neglecting to administer medications to patients.
- The most serious errors were dosage mistakes and problems with intravenous (IV) lines.
- Errors were rarely reported to family members.
- Hospital staff reported more mistakes within the confines of a blame-free system.
The article states that most of these errors occur in the ICU and that 98% of the errors failed to result in harm to the patients.
Reference:
Seaman, Andrew. “Patients Rarely Told About Medication Errors: Study.” Reuters. January 14, 2013. Website. Retrieved January 30, 2013.
Categories: Medicine, Small Doses
MSP3 - The Policy Cafe 
Thank goodness that it seems that most errors doesn’t seem to cause significant damage to the patient, but even if there is a 2% chance of negative outcomes- that is 2% too much when it involves the life of a patient being potentially lost.
I agree. Anything more than 0% is too much.