Medical Harm and Patient Safety- II: Medication Errors

Patient safety and medication errors

The morbidity and mortality of drug-related problems has most recently been estimated to cost $177.4 billion annually within the United States alone. Empirical investigations have also suggested that almost one-fifth of all medical errors are drug-related within hospital settings, with over half of these being of a preventable nature. As such, minimizing medication errors has emerged as a prior...

Improve patient safety and reduce medical errors.

Considering the complex nature of medical practice, however, and the multitude of interventions that each patient receives, a high error rate in medicine is perhaps not surprising. Health care professionals such as physicians, nurses, and pharmacists are trained to be careful and to function at a high level of efficiency. Notwithstanding, if a system is working at 99.9% efficiency, the 0.1% err...

Medication Without Harm: WHO's Third Global Patient Safety Challenge

1680 www.thelancet.com Vol 389 April 29, 2017 In 1960, Alphonse Chapanis, turned his attention from engineering to health care. In a study of medicationrelated errors in a 1100-bed hospital, he and his colleague identified seven sources of such errors potentially leading to harm to a patient: medicine omitted, or given to the wrong patient, at the wrong dose, as an unintended extra dose, by the...

The third global patient safety challenge: tackling medication-related harm.

Introduction to medication errors and medication safety

A medication safety incident is defined by the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) as: ‘any unintended or unexpected incident which could have or did lead to harm for one or more patients’ (NPSA, 2007:9). These incidents can occur at each stage of the process involved in the delivery of medicines to patients, i.e. prescribing (including transcribing or physician ordering), dispensing, prepara...