Jan
2
More and more patients are taking medication for cancer at home. While it’s nice that patients get to go home, it also means more errors with medication.
In a study of 1300 patients reported by Science Daily, 7% of adults and 19% of children had medication errors, often with harm to the patient.
You’ll notice that confusion over orders was a prime contributor to medication errors. The errors for adults included administration of incorrect medication doses due to confusion over conflicting orders. Examples of pediatric errors included parents giving the wrong dose or the wrong number of doses per day of medicines because of a caregiver’s confusion about instructions.
Better communications was cited as a key to alleviating the problem:
“Requiring that medication orders be written on the day of administration, following review of lab results, may be a simple strategy for preventing errors among adults, while most of the errors involving children may have been avoided by better communication and support for parents of children who use chemotherapy medications at home,” said Dr. Walsh.