DOI: 10.1097/PTS.0b013e31815db492

,  

Issn Print: 1549-8417

Publication Date: 2008/03/01


Print

Forging a New Path to Medication Safety With Emergency Pharmacists

Carolyn M. Clancy

    loading  Checking for direct PDF access through Ovid

Excerpt

Patient safety advocates, health care organizations, and health care providers are aware of the need to prevent adverse drug events, which account for nearly 20% of adverse events overall.1
Today, significant progress is underway to comply with national patient safety goals set by the Joint Commission to reduce the risk of medication-related adverse events. These goals include labeling all medications, flagging drugs whose names look or sound alike, and standardizing and limiting the number of drug concentrations used.2
Awareness of the need to reduce adverse drug events in an especially high-risk environment-hospital emergency departments (EDs)-is also growing. Hospital EDs had the highest rate of preventable adverse events in the environments studied by the Institute of Medicine, with a potential of 3.8 million annual events thought to be preventable, according to the Institute of Medicine's (IOM's) 2000 report, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System.1
Although adverse drug events occur in both inpatient and outpatient settings, the complex nature and fast pace of hospital EDs can increase their likelihood.
For example, both physician and nursing staff care for many patients in a short time frame in the midst of multiple interruptions-a situation that has intensified with hospital ED overcrowding and boarding.3 In addition, the fast clinical decision making that is required in EDs sometimes demands that medication orders be given verbally, thereby increasing the chance of misinterpretation. Risks are further heightened by patients' incomplete or unavailable medical information, which often includes current medications and drug allergies.

Related Topics

    loading  Loading Related Articles