Across healthcare and at home, patients face the risk of medical error. A landmark study by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), entitled, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Healthcare System, estimated that as many as 98,000 Americans die each year due to a variety of medical errors.
- 7,000 of these deaths are due to errors involving medications.
- In 2001, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found that more than 770,000 people are injured or die each year from adverse drug events, and that many of these injuries could be prevented by reducing the number of medication errors.
- According to Bates et al., 12 percent of all patients admitted to the hospital are exposed to an adverse drug event (ADE) or potential ADE. An ADE is an injury resulting from medical intervention related to a drug. 1.8 percent of these ADEs are preventable.
The hospital medication use process is comprised of four stages:
- Prescribing (whereby the physician indicates what drug a patient should receive when and at what dosage)
- Transcribing (when the order is entered into the pharmacy system)
- Dispensing (when a given drug is distributed to the patient floor by the pharmacy)
- Administration (the last stage, when the nurse gives the drug to the patient)
Errors in medication use can occur at any one of these four stages. Fortunately, many errors in prescribing, transcribing, and dispensing are intercepted prior to administering the drug to the patient. Unfortunately, as these data from the landmark study by Leape et al. illustrate, almost no errors that occur during administration are caught, thereby causing 51 percent of all preventable and potential ADEs. Therefore, medication administration is where Hospira has focused its efforts.
To help reduce the risk of ADEs, experts have identified the types of errors that occur during the hospital medication-use process.
Wrong dose and wrong drug are two leading types of errors, accounting for 39 percent.
The five rights of medication administration are:
- Right Drug
- Right Dose
- Right Patient
- Right Time
- Right Route
By confirming the accuracy of the drug, dose, patient, time, and route, medication errors at the bedside can be
prevented before an ADE occurs. Medication Management systems, with bar code capabilities, are devised to help
caregivers confirm these five rights and reduce medication errors.
Hospira is committed to helping hospitals reduce medication errors and improve patient safety by applying bar
codes to all injectable drugs and I.V. solutions. Bar code-reading technology has been incorporated into several
Hospira infusion devices.