Americans are made sick, injured, or killed every year by errors in
prescribing or administering medication.
The IOM report, which was requested
by Congress in 2003, concluded that drug mistakes in hospitals are so
common that any given patient will experience a medical error every day
he or she stays there.
"Everyone in the health care system
knows this is a major problem, but there's been very little action, and
it's generally remained on the back burner," says IOM panel member
Charles B. Inlander.
The report cites common errors like
doctors writing
prescriptions
that could negatively interact with the drugs a patient is already
taking, pharmacists filling prescriptions for
medications
of the wrong strength, and nurses either dispensing the wrong medicine
altogether, or wrong doses of the right medicines in intravenous drips.
The report's authors suggest possible
solutions, such as requiring
hospitals
to have a standardized bar-code system to ensure correct medications and
dosages. However, drug companies and drug vendors have created six
different systems that require different bar-code readers to work, so
such a system has not been effective so far.
Though the focus of the study was not
to determine the FDA's role in
medical errors,
the report made it clear that IOM experts believe
the FDA
and pharmaceutical companies have not effectively made drug packaging
error-proof, or made drug information accessible to the public.
The
report also found that hospitals and long-term care facilities do not
report medical errors to patients unless the errors result in death or
injury -- a policy the IOM says must change, as past studies have found
that drug errors cause at least 400,000 preventable deaths every year in
hospitals, as well as more than 800,000 such deaths in nursing homes and
530,000 preventable deaths among Medicare recipients in outpatient
clinics.
Source:
www.newstarget.com
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