Surgeries and hospital stays are designed to improve a patient’s health. When patients are harmed by a preventable medical error, they can feel robbed of that natural expectation of help and healing. These errors really cast a very, very long shadow. What was supposed to be a safe place turned out to be a very dangerous place.
Despite substantial efforts by many healthcare organizations, medical errors remain too common and continue to generate significant personal and financial burdens. Medical errors can be defined as the failure of a planned action to be completed as intended or the use of a wrong plan to achieve an aim. High error rates with serious consequences are most likely to occur in intensive care units, operating rooms, and emergency. There are seven common medication mistakes: prescribing incorrectly as a result of misdiagnosis, excessive dosages of medications, too many drugs, downplaying side effects, overlooking the consumer’s expertise, discouraging consumers from learning about their medications, and the prescription-sheet relationship between the psychiatrist and consumer.
Impact of Medical errors on professionals & Families
Every day, well-meaning health care providers working in clinically complex environments face the harsh reality of unanticipated and sometimes tragic patient outcomes in their chosen profession. As a result, we believe a large portion of the health care workforce has been suffering in relative silence unsupported during career-related anxiety, stress, and sometimes even shame or guilt. Most errors are not due to surgeons who either lack the necessary ability or insight to prevent an error.
Medical workers, including doctors, nurses, and the laboratory technicians involved in diagnoses are humans. Humans make mistakes; therefore, we cannot expect this group of people to have a track record of zero mistake throughout their career history. Nevertheless, getting involved in the field of medicine and healthcare business is a huge responsibility. Therefore, anyone participating in this field must try his/her best to stay calm and alert during the duty time. It is very difficult to be a perfect man, but we can try our best to be as good as possible. Doctors or nurses who struggle after a medical error, death of a child or other unexpected event can lose confidence, have flashbacks and feel like abandoning their careers.
Some mistakes can be considered as "silly mistakes" and must be avoided. For example: giving the wrong type of blood to the patient during transfusion, or accidentally giving the wrong drugs to the wrong patients. However, certain errors may be happening due to special circumstances. For example, misdiagnosis of malaria, babesiosis, zoonotic infections and certain other tropical infections in hospital settings of urban areas in temperate regions. Such errors are due to lack of experience and exposure to the infections by the medical workers, and hence, overlooked the infections at the first place. Such error can be minimized by training and courses of seminars. Families who have been wronged by the medical system also need support and counseling. Inadequate communication between healthcare providers, or between providers and the patient and family members, was the root cause of over half the serious adverse events in accredited hospitals.
Pharmacist role in Harm Reduction
Errors with those medications can have serious long-term consequences if they’re not identified – potentially leading to drug resistance, treatment failure, or even death. Reduction of errors has become an important marker of the quality of care and is included in the clinical performance indicators. By identifying and studying adverse events, we can learn lessons and change practice in a manner that will make such events less likely in the future, and hence improve the safety of patients and the quality of care.
Pharmacists are unique members of the multidisciplinary team that can improve the process because of their familiarity with medication dosage forms, brand and generic names, and outpatient pharmacy practice. Pharmacists play important role in verifying new orders for accuracy when drugs are first prescribed, and ending with patient counseling when they’re discharged. Clinical pharmacists performing drug therapy reviews and the teaching of physicians and their patients about drug safety and polypharmacy, as well as collaborating with physicians and patients to correct polypharmacy problems. This led to a marked improvement in interactions and cost. Similar programs are likely to reduce the potentially deleterious consequences of polypharmacy. Such programs hinge upon patients and doctors informing pharmacists of other medications being prescribed, as well as herbal, over-the-counter substances and supplements that occasionally interfere with prescription-only medication.
Errors cannot be ignored. They must be recognized; their causes analyzed; and preventive measures taken. We should try to understand the causes of errors, to install an informative reporting system of adverse events as an essential prerequisite, to measure them, and to choose the best approaches for minimizing the harm to patients. Patient safety is to be improved by the collective effort of all those involved in mental health care. Close attention from pharmacists, however, helps ensure that those mistakes don’t make it to the bedside.
- Shalini Sharma
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