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Hospital drug errors far from uncommon
From the Los Angeles Times - November 22, 2007 By Rong-Gong Lin II and Teresa Watanabe Los Angeles Times Staff Writers The case of actor Dennis Quaid's newborn twins, who were reportedly given 1,000 times the intended dosage of a blood thinner at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, underscores one of the biggest problems facing the healthcare industry: medication errors. At least 1.5 million Americans a year are injured after receiving
the wrong medication or the incorrect dose, according to the Institute
of Medicine, part of the National Academies of Science. Such incidents
have more than doubled in the last decade. Patient, protect thyself The numbers can be worrisome -- 1 out of 10 hospitalized patients picks up an infection or suffers some kind of mistake while in the hospital, statistics show. And the stories are frightening -- Dennis Quaid's newborn babies were given a huge overdose of a drug two months ago at a hospital with a top-notch reputation. So what is a medical consumer to do? Should we all be afraid
to go to the hospital? 1 in 10 patients gets drug error One in every 10 patients admitted to six Massachusetts community hospitals suffered serious and avoidable medication mistakes, according to a report being released today by two nonprofit groups that are urging all hospitals in the state to install a computerized prescription ordering system. The report is the first large-scale study of preventable prescription
errors in community hospitals, and its author, Dr. David Bates
of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said he was surprised
that these mistakes were so frequent in these community hospitals.
Previous studies in large academic hospitals that also lacked
computerized systems found such medication errors occurred less
than half as often, he said. Survive pneumonia? Depends which
hospital you choose. The third report since 2004 on how California hospitals treat pneumonia confirmed that where patients go can mean the difference between living and dying. Patients at the worst - performing hospitals were twice as likely to die as those at the best-ranked hospitals. Read full article here... The New York Times Correction Appended One morning not long ago, I got a call from the emergency room
at my hospital. A young man — an intern, in fact, who had
been on rounds that morning — had been admitted with chest
pains…. Afterward, in the control room, heat rose to my
face as colleagues wandered in to inquire about what was going
on. “How could we have missed this?” I asked aloud…. Report: OC Hospital Operated On
Patient's Wrong Knee Dennis Quaid Recounts Twins' Drug
Ordeal Hoping to draw attention to medical errors that kill as many
as 100,000 Americans a year, actor Dennis Quaid gives a detailed
account for the first time on television of the medical mistakes
that nearly killed his newborn twins. MSNBC - updated 5:28 a.m. PT, Tues., April. 8, 2008 High-profile medical errors such as operating on the wrong body
part or receiving a mistaken dose of drugs should take a back
seat to a far more common and insidious mistake, a new report
reveals. Associated Press - May 15, 2008 WASHINGTON (AP) — Actor Dennis Quaid told Congress on Wednesday that taking away the right to sue pharmaceutical companies would turn consumers into "uninformed and uncompensated lab rats." Some 7,000 people in the United States die every year from medication
errors.
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Copyright©
2008 Martine Ehrenclou. All Rights Reserved.
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