As advances in technology have changed the way that people communicate and process information, so have they improved most health care procedures and treatments. Despite this, hospital patients in New York and across the country continue to suffer from medication errors at an increasing rate.
As advances in technology have changed the way that people communicate and process information, so have they improved most health care procedures and treatments. Despite this, hospital patients in New York and across the country continue to suffer from medication errors at an increasing rate.
A recent study shows that the amount of cases in which hospital pharmacists fail to fill prescriptions accurately increases in accordance with how many orders they have to verify per shift. The researchers observed 50 pharmacists for one year, and 62 percent of them made at least one error. The highest risk of medication error was associated with a pharmacist having to verify more than 400 orders in a shift, and the overall rate of error was 4.87 per 100,000 prescription orders.
The Institute of Medicine conducted a study in 2006 that found that more than 1.5 million Americans are injured annually because of medication errors, costing over $3.5 billion a year. Additionally, the more recent study found that hospital pharmacists are twice as likely to fill the wrong medication for patients who are in critical care than for patients who are not. Of these errors, 20 percent are life-threatening and 42 percent require additional treatments to sustain the patients’ lives.
The main factor that influences medication errors could be how many medications are prescribed and filled. The average patient in a hospital is prescribed nine or 10 medications, so it seems that limiting the number of medications that a patient is taking and reassessing the patient’s need to keep taking certain medications after discharge might be a solution.
Since repairing the damage resulting from cases that involve the wrong dosage or wrong drug is so expensive, many patients and their families could be thrown into financial distress. If doctor, hospital or pharmacist negligence was the cause of their medication errors, the patients and their families may want to meet with a medical malpractice attorney to determine how to proceed in seeking compensation.
