This is a very common scene in our homes, when whenever we get sick, we always try to find a simple and easy way to solve this disease with our bedside drug box. If we take an example, for example, when we returned from our work, and it was quite a busy day and warm weather, we usually get a headache, and we try to find a solution to this in the Dyklofenac pain killer. But we do not even know that it is associated with a large number of side effects (stomach pain, diarrhea, nausea, etc.).
Medication error is the second largest in terms of medical errors. One study proves that 5% of all hospitalizations are caused by the adverse effect of the drug (ADR), and this is the fifth most common cause of death in hospitals, these errors caused 197,000 deaths per year in European countries only.
Before turning to the main discussion, which is how we can avoid mistakes in treatment and what preventive measures we can take for our health and safety, we need to know what treatment errors are, its types and what are the most common and the infectious treatment errors that we face in our daily lives.
Medication errors refer to errors in the ordering, rewriting, dosing, administration, or monitoring of drugs. It is believed that many treatment errors have little or no effect on the patient’s health, but can lead to serious morbidity or mortality in patients.
There are three types of errors that led the patient to a fatal state, and they give out errors, manage errors and prescription errors.
Medication dosing error:
Dispensing errors occur at any stage of the dispensing process, starting with taking the prescription at the pharmacy and ending with the delivery of medications issued to the patient. Dosing errors occur at a rate of 1-24% and include the choice of the wrong strength or product. This occurs primarily with drugs that have a similar name or appearance.
Approaches to reducing drug dosing errors:
- Ensuring safe dosage.
- Individual drugs with a similar name or appearance.
- Keeping interruptions in the dosing procedure to a minimum and keeping the pharmacist's workload at a safe and manageable level.
- Awareness of high-risk drugs such as potassium chloride and cytotoxic agents.
- Introduce safe, systematic drug dispensing procedures at the pharmacy.
Administration Treatment Errors:
Administrative errors occur when there is a mismatch between the medication received by the patient and the medication prescribed by the prescribing drug. Medication administration errors are associated with inactivity errors when the drug is not administered for a variety of reasons. Other types of errors include incorrect administration method and administration of incorrect or expired drugs.
Approaches to reducing errors in the introduction of drugs:
- Verify the identity of the patient.
- Ensuring that dosing calculations are independently verified by another health professional prior to drug administration.
- Ensuring that the prescription, the drug and the patient are in the same place so that they can be tested against each other.
- Providing medication at the right time.
- Minimize interruptions during drug rounds.
Treatment recipe:
Medical prescriptions are also very important when we talk about drug errors. Nearly 70% of medication errors are caused by prescription errors.
Approaches to reducing prescription drug error:
- Tell your doctor that, in order to avoid using abbreviations, abbreviations were considered particularly dangerous because they were constantly misunderstood.
- The prescription procedure must include a brief target designation (for example, for coughing), it can also ensure that the proper medication is given out, and will create additional safety checks in the process.
- All prescriptions made by doctors or physicians should indicate the age and weight of patients in the order of medication. The age and weight of the patient can help health care professionals in double checking the appropriate drug and dose.
- Orders for medicines should not include unspecified instructions, such as “Take as directed” or “Take / use as needed” as the only use of drugs. Clear instructions are needed for the dispenser: check the correct dose for the patient and also give the opportunity to counsel the patient.
- Order of drugs should include the name of the drug, the exact metric weight, concentration and dosage form. This helps the pharmacist to verify either lack of information or doubt.
Concluding remarks:
Since we all know the famous idiomatic suggestion that “prevention is better than cure,” is indeed an important factor when we discuss issues such as treatment errors. Medication errors are one of the most preventable causes of patient injury. At each stage of the patient care process, there are a number of factors that contribute to a high level of errors in drug treatment. Special attention should be paid to prescription and administration patient care options, due to the large number of errors tracked during those stages of treatment.
