--> An international clearinghouse for confidential reports of medication errors, especially in hospitals.
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine altmed.od.nih.gov
Phone: 888-644-6226
This site provides information on alternate courses of treatment for various illnesses. Do not seek the therapies provided on this site without first consulting a physician.
Healthcare Communications Group www.healthcg.com
This is one of the top providers of information on AIDS drugs.
Medicine Online www.meds. |
 The safety standards they are "pressing for" consist of, among other things, hospital purchases of sophisticated, expensive new information technologies that automate their operations, such as electronic drug ordering systems designed to prevent drug-to-drug interactions and other medication errors. Such new information technologies cost several hundreds of thousands of dollars; some of the best cost in excess of $1 million. |
 These estimates do not include costs of injuries to pa dents, malpractice costs, or the costs of less serious medication errors or hospital admissions related to ADE's.
5. The additional length of a hospital stay associated with an ADE was 2.2 days (for a preventable ADE, it was 4.6 days)
6. The increase in costs associated with an ADE was $3,244 (preventable ADE cost was $5,857.)
7. They found that the occurrence of an ADE was asso ciated with nearly double the risk of death (1.88).
8. They found that ADE's may account for up to 140,000 deaths annually in the U.S. |
 In 1991, Susanna Bedell studied cardiac arrests caused by medical treatment in a Boston teaching hospital; 15 of 203 episodes were caused by preventable medication errors.31 In 1991, Lucian Leape and 11 Harvard colleagues studied adverse events of all types in New York State hospitals.32 Drug complications were the single most common adverse event. An expert panel concluded that 17.7 percent of the drug complications were due to outright negligence. In 1987, Judyann Bigby examined 686 patients in a primary care medical practice who required emergency hospital admission. |
| Lehman's case inspired a conference in Boston in January 1996 that attacked the drug safety problem from a novel perspective: it focused on preventing hospital medication errors. By this time I was attending any symposium that might even vaguely touch on the issues surrounding Diane's drug reaction—trolling for sources, ideas, perhaps even tidbits about her specific case. I got a notice about the conference from the medical writer who had been Floxed and periodically faxes me interesting drug-related journal articles, and I hurriedly booked a flight to Boston. |
 National Academy of Sciences, estimates that preventable medication errors result in more than 7,000 deaths each year in hospitals alone. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, medical errors are the eighth leading cause of death among Americans.
Some herbal medicines can have side effects, but these effects are rare and seldom severe. Generally, taking an over-the-counter herb at random will result in no more serious complication than a stomachache. |
| The subject of preventing medication errors didn't sound much different from what I had been researching. But when I got to the conference, I realized it was. The conference focused less on inadequate drug knowledge and communication problems than on hospital system errors. And the symposium was directed less at doctors than at hospital administrators, with much of it couched in the language of management consulting rather than medicine. |
| Americans a year are injured by hospital treatment, 180,000 of them die and 69 percent of those injuries are from errors that can be found in hospital records if someone looks hard enough. medication errors are the highest single category, accounting for nearly 20 percent of all treatment injuries—or looked at another way, 7 percent of all hospital patients experience serious error with their medications (although not every error results in an injury). Using a systems approach, however, Leape was quick to compare these figures to other fields. |
| He started noticing medication errors as a young pharmacist at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia. The errors were often caused by unreadable doctors' orders, confusing product labels or improper IV connections. Cohen would hear about the errors mostly from nurses and pharmacists, because "doctors barely ever talked to pharmacists," and he eventually began doing a little column for a nursing journal. |
 Reporting of medication errors or near-errors to help avoid future problems through improvement in product names and packaging.
Information for Health Professionals
Center for Drug Information Hot Line...........................................................................................................301-827-4573
Information on human drugs including hormones.
Center for Biologies Office of Communications............................................................................................301-827-2000
Information on biological products including vaccines and blood. |
 They found 247 "adverse drug events," meaning medication errors that injured the patient in some way. Of these, 70 or 28 percent were considered preventable. Of the 70, 56 percent were caused by physician error and 34 percent by improper administration by a nurse.
Watch for Errors Like a Hawk: This Is Your Life
You can protect yourself by keeping track of what medications you are being given. Before you go into the hospital, ask your physician what medications you will be given; the exact brand name and generic name; what they are prescribed for; the dosage, i.e. |
 Unfortunately, medication errors are shockingly frequent in hospitals. A Harvard School of Public Health study of two major Boston hospitals over a six-month period found that more than 40 percent of the most serious drug reactions in hospitals, largely caused by doctors' and nurses' mistakes, may be preventable. |
| We have to do better than that, more like 99.9 percent efficiency," he said. "If other industries had the error rate of hospitals, we would have, in the United States, eighty-four unsafe landings a day. Every hour there would be sixteen thousand lost letters and thirty-two thousand bank check errors."
The problem, he said, is that "the medical model doesn't focus on systems but on individuals. It's never 'What went wrong?' but always 'Who is to blame? |
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