Medication Error

Serious medication errors occur over One Million times each year and large percentage are life threatening. Giving the incorrect medication, wrong dosage or improperly combining medication can cause adverse reactions with fatal results. Often the doctor may have incomplete patient information such as not knowing about patients' allergies, other medicines they are taking, previous diagnoses, and lab results.

Common Medication Mistakes

Preventable errors occur because systems for safely prescribing and ordering medication are not appropriately used.

• A widely recognized cause of error is illegible handwritten prescriptions.
• Errors may result from insufficient or missing information about co-prescribed medications, past dose-response relationships, laboratory values and allergic sensitivities.
• Errors in prescribing can occur when an incorrect drug or dose is selected, or when a regimen is too complex.
• When prescriptions are transmitted orally, sound-alike names may cause error.
• Similarly, drugs with similar-looking names can be incorrectly dispensed when prescriptions are handwritten.
• Physician sampling of medications can contribute to medication errors due to the lack of both adequate documentation and drug utilization review.

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