Bad news today for the NHS. According to The Guardian, a report by the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) has revealed that the number of medication errors made by staff has doubled over the last 2 years. The report identified the rise as “significant”.
The number of incidents reported in 2005 stood at 36,335 with the figure for 2007 listed as 86, 085.
The good news? Of these incidents 96% resulted in low or no harm to patients.
The bad news? Out of the other 4%, 100 incidents resulted in serious harm or death.
The good thing is the people who are reporting these errors are the staff members and the NHS is encouraging staff to document mistakes so that they can continually investigate and improve the system in operation and try to eliminate as many errors as possible.
All this doesn’t make for terrific reading for NHS patients and doesn’t fill you with confidence in the competence of the professionals administering the medication. Even more worrying is that Professor David Cousins, a senior pharmacist at the NPSA, believes that the number of incidents reported only represent 10% of those which actually occurred. If this is true then the real figures are that in 2007 there may have been somewhere in the region of 860,000 errors or near misses.
All kinds of errors are listed, with patient A getting patient B’s medicine and vica versa, the wrong size of dose being given or the wrong quantity of medicine being given to patients among the most common mistakes being made.
According to the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, Norman Lamb the NHS spends “nearly £1bn a year which could be spent on patient care” on settling damages claims. This means that by identifying the errors with the system, although the costs in the short term may be high with a greater number of damages claims, long term it should make for a better NHS minimising the number of errors occurring and making for a higher level of patient care. In the meantime, however, if you have been the victim of pain and suffering following a medical errors then you might have a medical claim for negligence.
