While few want to consider it, there are of course many ways in which a patient could be subjected to a medical error while in the care of a doctor, nurse or other healthcare provider. These errors run the gamut and include receiving the wrong dosage of a medication, receiving the wrong medication or not receiving any medication at all. These types of incidents occur far more often than anyone likely realizes.
According to a recent study, the good news is that the majority of the time, or 98 percent, medication errors do not actually harm the individual who receives the wrong medication or dose. The bad news is that while patients are often encouraged to take control of their health care, rarely are they told that such an error has occurred.
The study looked at information located in a database containing voluntarily reported issues relating to medication. A total of 840,000 errors were culled from 537 hospitals located throughout the nation. The errors occurred over a six year period beginning in 1999.
Perhaps not surprisingly the errors occurred in some situations over others. The problem most commonly arose in intensive care units. Here a patient not getting the medication he or she is supposed to proved to be the biggest issue. Errors such as this resulted in harm to ICU patients about 4 percent of the time. This is about 2 percent higher than in non-ICU situations and is probably not all that surprising since a patient who is in the ICU is already dealing with health issues considered to be more serious than the average hospital patient.
Humans are well, only human. This means that at some point it is possible that a mistake in a health care setting will occur. Many humans learn from their mistakes however. In order for this to happen a person must be aware that he or she has committed such an error. Unfortunately this study found that in less than half of the situations is the health care provider made aware of the medication error. The percentage of times in which a patient is told about the mistake is even smaller, 2 percent.
The prevention of errors related to medication is continually being worked toward. Do you have any recommendations?
Source: Chicago Tribune, "Patients rarely told about medication errors," Andrew M. Seaman, Jan. 11, 2013