medication errors

Evidence is piling up, in study after study, that it just makes sense to limit work shifts for residents and interns. In today's example, which comes from the Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers at Yale-New Haven Hospital collected data on treatment and outcomes …

Hospitals that focus too tightly on cutting costs may create preventable problems such as medication errors and hospital-acquired infections, according to a new study by two Boston-area hospitals. To gather data, researchers studied four hospitals, including two urban teaching hospitals and two suburban hospitals, looking at 6,841 patient records over 12 months. The study found that when patient-to-nurse ratios at one of the four unnamed hospitals studied climbed 10 percent, the hospital …

In the past, hospital trustees have served as something of a cheering section, advising management but just as importantly, rallying support within the communities the hospital serves. Of late, however, hospital trustees are being asked to expand their role to focus on patient safety issues. While trustees are in no position to make medical decisions, they are more likely to nudge the board in the right direction if they focus on patient safety, observers say.

For example, in her …

A new study suggests that while nursing home staffers know about virtually all medication errors that occur at their facility, only 5 percent of errors ever get reported to facility managers. To conduct the study, which was recently published in Nursing Forum, a University of Missouri-Columbia nursing researcher reviewed communication patterns, leadership styles and relationships between staff members at five nursing homes. The researcher found that nursing team members were …

Medication errors harm 1.5 million people a year in the U.S., kill several thousand and cost the nation's healthcare system at least $3.5 billion, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine. They're so common that patients should expect to experience an average of one for each day they're in the hospital, although most don't cause harm, the report said.

While information technology can play a key role in correcting the problems on the providers' side, with computer systems …

Researchers at Johns Hopkins released a study that concludes requiring doctors and nurses to report medication errors and log them in a database improves care quality and decreases the chances that providers will make mistakes. The research, which appears in the June issue of the journal Quality & Safety in Healthcare, looked at mistakes at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center. In the study, researchers found errors occur during every step of the medication process …

A new law goes into effect in Washington state that makes it illegal for pharmacies to fill any prescription that is not either printed, typewritten or electronically generated. The legislation is an attempt to combat the tradition of barely legible physician handwriting on paper prescriptions, which critics say can cause preventable medication errors.

- read this article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center health system is rolling out a new CPOE system at one of its hospitals despite a study last year that found that found unexpectedly negative side effects of an earlier rollout at Children's Hospital. Dr. Eugene Wiener said, "I don't believe a single patient died because of this, and all of our data show that medication errors significantly decreased each year after implementing the system." Article

Swayed by the arguments of advocates, many hospitals are eventually planning to adopt EMRs and other new technologies. As a temporary measure, some hospitals are turning toward to a simpler--but probably quite effective--solution. Projects like the Vial of Life allow patients to download and print out a paper record of their medication histories and other key medical data. That harmless looking little piece of paper could end up saving a lot of lives: The Institute for Healthcare …

> NPR's Talk of the Nation reviews You: The Smart Patient. An Insider's Guide to Getting the Best Treatment, by Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz. Article

> The Washington Post examines the effort to convince hospitals to use RFID technology on patients. Article

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