Nearly one in 10 hospital prescriptions contain an error, according to research conducted at the University of Manchester.
According to the BBC, the mistakes in the prescriptions range from the minor to the potentially lethal, however the General Medical Council (or GMC) has found that very few of the errors made would cause serious harm.
The study was conducted after concerns that novice doctors were making prescription errors. However, the study showed that they were no more responsible than experienced doctors.
Of 124,260 prescriptions examined across 19 hospitals, just under 9% contained errors. The vast majority of the errors were caught and corrected before reaching the patient however, of the 11,077 errors which were discovered, 2% of them contained potentially lethal instructions.
The errors rarely caused harm to a patient because on the whole they were stopped by senior doctors and nurses, but this has also led to concerns that some doctors have come to rely on their more senior colleagues to pick up on their mistakes.
One of the key ways to improve the system and reduce the number of errors is the GMC’s proposal to put forward a standardised prescription form for throughout the whole of the UK. This is already in place in Wales.
The high number of errors which are occurring is an unacceptable statistic, no matter how many of them are being caught through the system. The necessity for senior consultants to have to intercept incorrect prescriptions should be a last resort and they shouldn’t have to be relied on with such regularity. This level of complacency when writing prescriptions leaves you to wonder whether patients are getting appropriate levels of attention from their consultants and how long it will be before one slips through the net and a patient suffers serious injury as a consequence of the wrong prescription.
