Medical Malpractice
1.5 Million Injured Annually by Drug Errors
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July 21st, 2006
"Drug Errors Injury 1.5 Million Annually"
A report issued yesterday by the Institute of Medicine said that medication errors injure or kill at least 1.5 million Americans every year – a number that amounts to one mistake per hospital per day.
The most common drug errors are caused by name confusion, wrong doses, and various other problems. In 1999, the institute reported that 98,000 deaths a year are caused by medical errors, with at least 7,000 a result of medication mistakes.
“We were initially quite surprised by the number of mistakes, but the more we heard, the more convinced we were that these are actually serious underestimates,” said Dr. Kevin Johnson of Vanderbilt University.
A Treatment Tragedy
The report cited the story of Boston Globe health reporter Betsy Lehman, a 39-year-old mother of two who was being treated for breast cancer at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 1994.
Farber received an overwhelming dose of cancer drugs when a nurse administered in one day the total amount she was supposed to receive over a period of four days. The staff paid no attention to Farber''s complaints about the effects of the overdose, and she ended up dying.
Recommendations for Improvement
In light of the evidence, researchers have made several recommendations for new risk-minimizing medication procedures. The recommendations specifically emphasize computerized prescribing, administration, and data acquisition procedures.
“The current process by which medications are prescribed, dispensed, administered and monitored is characterized by many serious problems that threaten both the safety and positive outcomes of patients,” said panel co-chairman J. Lyle Bootman of the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy.
Of the 1.5 million drug mistakes made annually, an estimated 400,000 are preventable. More than 4 billion prescriptions are written each year in the United States, with most errors associated with insulin, morphine, potassium chloride, and certain anticoagulants.
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