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By Sarah Lyall
About 1,200 people died in public hospitals
in Britain last year because of mistakes in prescribing and
administering medicine, according to a report published by
a government watchdog group.
Outlined in a report by the Audit Commission,
the errors included administering the wrong medicine - in
one case, a breast cancer patient was given the sleeping drug
Temazepam instead of the cancer drug Tamoxifen - to giving
out the wrong dosage of the right drug, to unknowingly prescribing
a drug that caused a fatal reaction.
The death
toll was five times higher than that in 1990, according to
the report.
In addition, the thousands of patients
who survive medicine-related mistakes each year invariably
become sicker, requiring more treatment that create an extra
expense for the National Health Service, the report said.
"The health service is probably spending
$725 million a year making better people who experienced an
adverse incident or errors, and that does not include the
human cost to patients," said Nick Mapstone, an author
of the report.
Mr.
Mapstone said that many of the most common errors are avoidable
and could be rectified if the health service introduced computerized
patient record and prescription systems.
As
it is now, patients' notes are often illegible, incomplete
or missing altogether, the report said, making
it impossible
for doctors and nurses to have accurate information.
The government has promised to introduce computerized prescriptions
- which could include a standard national system for coding
medicines and the use of bar codes to support development
of electronic prescribing systems - by 2005, but Mr. Mapstone
said he did not think it would meet the deadline.
Addressing the issues raised by the report,
Dr. Trevor Pickersgill, a spokesman for the junior doctors'
committee of the British Medical Association, said that understaffing
in hospitals and the increasing complexity of modern drug
therapy have created a culture "where mistakes unfortunately
do happen."
"The number of drugs is increasing,
the effectiveness - and
therefore often the toxicity - of drugs is increasing,
the number of people on multiple medications is increasing,
and that increases the risk of interaction," Dr. Pickersgill
told the BBC.
"We must also remember that one in
six pharmacy posts in hospitals are unfilled, and new doctors
who are doing the work on the wards are overworked as well,"
he said.
A number of highly publicized cases of
drug-related error in recent months has brought home the problem.
In one case, a cancer patient was prescribed and administered
a drug at 1,000 times the recommended dose, according to the
report.
In another case, at Queen's Medical Center
in Nottingham, a teenager, who was a cancer patient in remission,
fell into a coma and died after an anticancer drug was mistakenly
injected into his spine.
"The recent events at Queen's Medical
Center illustrate how day-to- day pressures can lead to acknowledged
best practice being ignored," the report said.
Jackie Glatter, a spokeswoman for the
Consumers' Association, which lobbies for patients' rights,
said: "The report shows there is a strong need for detailed
and clear patient information about treatments and medicines
- not just in hospitals, but also when people are taking medicine
at home."
New York Times
December 20, 2001
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