Serious complications and injuries can result from discrepancies between the medications patients take at home, the medications they receive in the hospital, and the medications they take home with them. To prevent such medication errors, a recent study out of Johns Hopkins recommends that hospitals train teams of nurses and…
Hospitals must regularly contend with medical emergencies, such as heart attacks or allergic drug reactions, that require an immediate response. Hospitals maintain supplies for such emergencies, known as “crash carts,” that contain equipment and medications for diagnosing and, if necessary, reviving patients. Monitoring and maintaining the crash carts requires the…
Electronic health records (EHRs), used in place of voluminous paper records, may significantly reduce the risk of errors, and therefore medical malpractice claims. This finding is from a study published in the June 25 online edition of the Annals of Internal Medicine. Doctors have been very slow to adopt many…
A study published recently in the Annals of Emergency Medicine looked at whether the use of a trained, professional interpreter with limited-English or non-English-speaking patients in hospital emergency departments (ED’s) reduced the incidence of medication errors and other mistakes. The study compared situations in which a trained interpreter was present…
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the federal agency that reviews highway and aviation accidents and makes recommendations for safety regulations, could serve as a model for an entity to monitor patient safety, according to a number of celebrities and other advocates. A medical journal article co-authored by actor Dennis…
Handwritten prescription slips have always presented risks to patients. The risk of a pharmacist or pharmacy technician misreading a doctor’s handwriting, sometimes known as “chicken scratch” among pharmacists, leads to the risk of a misfilled prescription. This could involve the wrong dosage of a drug, or the wrong medicine entirely,…
The hospital pharmacy services director at Minnesota’s Hennepin County Medical Center, Bruce Thompson, noticed several years ago that his staff would often discover medication errors when patients returned to the hospital after treatment. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune recounted the story of a patient who left the hospital after a kidney transplant…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuGuYC80XxsThe Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (ARHQ), an agency of the federal government, has partnered with the Ad Council to promote two-way communication between patients and their doctors as a means of improving care and reducing errors. The campaign currently focuses on public service advertisements targeting clinicians and emphasizing…
Pharmacy and medication errors in hospitals and elsewhere in the health care system create substantial risks to patients, along with errors in diagnosis and treatment, equipment problems, and others. State governments often work to promote and improve protection of patient safety in health care. Oregon, as an example, has taken…
A new machine at the University of California at San Francisco may permanently change the way pharmacies operate, hopefully to the benefit of patient safety. The machine is a “robot pharmacist” named PillPick, and it does much of the work ordinarily performed by pharmacists and pharmacy technicians. So far, as…