Approximately eight million Americans experience preventable prescription errors each year. 1.5 million Americans are injured by medication errors.
It is understandable that mistakes can happen considering the process of acquiring medicine. First there is the decision to prescribe medicine. An erroneous decision could be made. Then there is the potential for a mistake to be made when writing the prescription. Dose selection or concentration could be wrong or poor handwriting could mean it is interpreted incorrectly. A patient’s medical history, current health and/or other prescribed medications could interact with a prescription. Inadequate communication between nurses and doctors in hospitals and other personnel can also contribute towards the problem. In short, there’s a lot that can go wrong and it’s easy to see why mistakes happen.
And this is just on the side of the medical professional. Patients, too, often make mistakes in their dosage. They may take the wrong dose or take another dose too soon to the previous one.
The cost of medication errors exceeds $40 billion annually. Most errors are preventable, and the cost isn’t only a financial one. While most of these errors result in no harm or low harm, some do result in severe harm and even death. This can lead to distrust in the healthcare system too.
Most mistakes concerned medications treating heart disease and diabetes. It is thought that the increase in use of these medications is the reason for the increase in medication errors.
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