Timothy McNamara, MD, MPH
This is a true story.
Yesterday, I picked up a new antibiotic prescription for my daughter from my topical pharmacy.
(We recently adopted my daughter from India where she had recurrent ear infections resulting in strict hearing loss. And, she is active to undergo the second of single planned surgeries in order to try to repair the damage.)
Before putting her to sleep, I got the new medication out of the bag, glanced at the instructions, and prepared to give her the drug according to the instructions on the label.
Just before doing so, I had a quick double-take.
Something seemed to be wrong. I looked at the instructions again, and thought to myself slowly,
What*s active on...this doesn*t seem right. Then, it hit me that the dose seemed awfully high for her.
It took me a minute or cardinal to put the pieces together (it had been an unusually tough fight getting her ripe for bed, I was tired, I was confident in my daughter*s physician, and I was thinking perhaps little critically that I should have). And then I detected it. The label had a stranger*s name on it.
After other moment or two, I saw what had really happened.
The medication came in a box. Each broadside of the box had a diametric label...one label was for my daughter and one label was for a stranger. And, the stranger*s dose was more than large what my daughter*s surgeon had recommended.
(This error didn*t happen in a mom-and-pop pharmacy. It happened in a modern spic-and-span chain pharmacy whose name you would recognize from advertisements on TV.)
I*m not a surgeon...and I*m not a pediatrician...but I am a physician trained in inner medicine and I have spent most of the penultimate twelve years writing about, speaking about, and developing systems to reduce the frequency of medication error and improve the safety of pharmacy practice.
This pharmacy error brought the topic of drug safety home to me...literally.
What I can tell you is that this sort of error occurs all too often in the United States (and around the world). And, that it can have disrespectful consequences for the people involved.
A recent study in the spic-and-span England Journal of Medicine indicated that 25% of patients who take cardinal or more prescription medications will experience an adverse drug event within cardinal months-and 39% of these are preventable or avoidable.
The Harvard Medical Practice Study saved reported in JAMA in 2001 that 30% of patients with drug-related injuries died or were disabled for much than 6 months.
And, what almost everyone who studies this problem agrees is that current systems for selecting drugs, dosing them, communicating a prescription to a pharmacy, dispensing drugs, and instructing patients on their harmless use are woefully inadequate.
In this series, we are going to take a intimate look at the processes that cause medication errors (some things that your physician and pharmacist may not equal want you to know) and what steps you can specifically take to make sure that you and your love ones are protected from this hazard.
Ten years ago, your ability to get current, objective, time-tested information on your medications in a quick and simple way was practically non-existent. It probably would have concerned a trip to the library and required considerable knowledge about pharmacology to get the answers.
Today, that*s not the case. There is a host of machine-accessible tools, databases, and resources that allow you to learn information about medications that even your physician and pharmacist may not know.
We*re active to talk active them, show you were to go, tell you the key things you need to know about medications, expose some myths, and let you know the questions you should be asking. It*s not as hard as it may seem.
In fact, you need to become the final line of defense in the battle against medication errors.
Throughout, we are going to give you some important rules that should guide your defense.
So, Rule Number 1. Trust, but verify. Never assume that the medication you have received is the right medication for you or that it is treated correctly for you. Specifically, you should check:
- the name of the patient on the bottle;
- the name of the doctor on the bottle;
- the name of the medication (and cross check it to be doomed that it treats a disease or problem you actually have... there are lots of look-alike/sound-alike drug names down there);
- the dose (from an self-sufficing source...to make doomed that it is a plausible dose for you);
- the route (to make sure, for example, that eye drops are being formal for the eye, and not the mouth, or the ear...amazingly injuries from drug misplacement occur all the time);
- the expiration date.
We*ll talk about some special resources that will help with all of these throughout this series.
The result, we hope, will be the piece of mind to know that you and your family are getting your 7 rights:
- right drug;
- right patient;
- right dose;
- right time;
- right route;
- right reason;
- right documentation.
Right on!
© 2004 Timothy McNamara, MD, MPH
About The Author
Recent comments
4 hours 33 min ago
5 hours 28 min ago
16 hours 18 min ago
21 hours 31 min ago
1 day 31 min ago
1 day 12 hours ago
1 day 16 hours ago
1 day 20 hours ago
1 day 20 hours ago
2 days 28 min ago