Drug Errors Affect Hospitalized Children Higher Numbers than Previously Thought
For those who know the statistics and the high frequency of errors in the pharmaceutical and medical communities, the following statistic may not really come as a shock. Bad drug reactions, accidental overdoses and medicine administration mix-ups adversely affect 1 in 15 hospitalized children.
This evidence comes from a recent study that used new detection methods to determine if a child was harmed by an administered medication. The study was conducted through the National Initiative for Children’s Healthcare Quality and the results were published in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
A new monitoring method was developed for this study which named 15 different “triggers” on a young patient’s medical chart that could suggest that an adverse drug event (ADE) had occurred. Using these identifying “triggers” the ADE could then be evaluated for severity of the incident, the ability to mitigate any circumstances connected with it, the ability to identify an earlier event of a similar nature and also to be able to do an analysis for future preventability. Previous statistics relied solely on hospital staffers reporting problems and lead to a much lower detection rate than using the new method of discovery.
The study evaluated 960 randomly selected medical charts from 12 different children’s hospitals. Researchers evaluated the charts looking for the specific “triggers” that would indicated an adverse reaction in a child. What they found was an adverse reaction of 11.1 per 100 patients, 15.7 per 1,000 patient-days in a hospital and 1.23 per 1,000 doses of medication. It was found that a number of the children had more than one incident of an adverse reaction. Data showed that roughly 1 in every 15 children hospitalized suffered from some form of adverse reaction.
Basically, the study shows that the rate of medical error is much higher than previously thought, according to Dr. Charles Homer of the National Initiative for Children’s Healthcare Quality. “These data and the Dennis Quaid episode are telling us that these kinds of errors and experiencing harm as a result of your healthcare is much more common that people believe. It’s very concerning,” he said. (Regarding actor Dennis Quaid, in the fall of 2007, whereby his twin daughters each received a dangerously high dose of the drug heparin as a result of a medical mix-up at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.)
This “trigger” study showed that 22 percent of all adverse drug events were considered to be preventable. In addition, 17.8 percent could have been identified earlier and 16.8 percent could have been handled better. It was also noted that using the traditional staffer reporting system, only about 3.7 percent of the incidents would ever have been identified. Advances made by this study could be very significant in reducing such events in hospitals in the future.
