What is a medication error? The National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting and Prevention defines it as follows:.
"A medication error is any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while the medication is in the control of the health care professional, patient, or consumer. Such events may be related to professional practice, health care products, procedures, and systems, including prescribing; order communication; product labeling, packaging, and nomenclature; compounding;dispensing; distribution; administration; education; monitoring; and use- (www.nccmerp.org).
According to the American Medical Association, medication errors such as illegible prescriptions or health care workers administering wrong dosages of medication kill an estimated 44,000 to 98,000 Americans annually. They also state that these statistics exceed deaths cause by highway accidents, AIDS, or breast cancer (Stephenson, 2000).
In May 2001, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reported 265 cases of medication errors that were not related to intentional suicides. There were 129 cases classified as serious, which is any adverse event that is fatal; life-threatening; associated with disability, hospitalization, or congenital anomaly; or which required intervention to prevent permanent impairment. Of the serious cases reported, 18 were fatal, 12 were life-threatening, 56 required hospitalization, 8 were disability reports, and 35 required interventions to prevent permanent damage. The cause of these medication errors were broken down into five categories; communication, name confusion, labeling, human factors, and packaging/design. Verbal, written, and misinterpretation communication composed 19% of the errors, name confusion made up 13%, and packaging/design were 6%. Human factors such as; knowledge deficit, performance deficit, miscalculation of dosage, drug preparation error, and fatigue contributes 42% to the total.