Preventing Medication Errors
(6.1 Contact Hours)

Written By Gail Zyla, MS, RD

 

The price of this course is $34.00. You will only be asked to pay for the course if you decide to grade the Post Examination to earn a certificate with Contact Hours (CEUs).

About the Author

Gail Zyla, MS, RD, is a freelance writer, editor, and consultant who has been covering health issues for more than a decade. A registered dietitian, Zyla formerly served as senior editor of the Tufts University Health & Nutrition Letter and the Harvard Health Letter. She has also been a visiting lecturer at the Tufts University School of Nutrition Science and Policy and an instructor at the Tufts University Schools of Medicine and Dental Medicine.

Zyla's articles have appeared in wide variety of publications including Consumer Reports On Health, Parenting, Redbook, and Reader's Digest. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the American Dietetic Association Media Excellence Award and the William Solimene Award of Excellence from the New England Chapter of the American Medical Writers Association.

Portions of this course are taken from "Can We Stop Drug Errors?" which appeared in the September, 2000, issue of InTouch magazine. The article earned a gold award in the National Health Information Awards and the Will Solimene Award of Excellence from the New England chapter of the American Medical Writers Association.
 

 

Course Objectives

After reading Preventing Medication Errors the participant will be able to:

 Define the extent of medication errors in the United States health care system.
 Name the root cause of medication errors.
 Identify steps in the delivery of drugs where mistakes most often occur.
 Describe safety systems that may help prevent common medication errors.
 Explain the difficulties inherent in documenting the number of mistakes typically made in health care settings.
 Name strategies to correct error-prone aspects of drug prescription writing.
 Identify dangerous abbreviations commonly used in drug prescription writing.
 Name strategies to help ensure accurate verbal orders for medications.
 Describe ways patients can help protect themselves from medication errors.
 Identify the Institute of Medicine's strategies for reducing errors in the United States health care system.
 

 

Introduction

Each year as many as 98,000 Americans die of medical mistakes -- more than the number of lives lost annually to car accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS -- according to a 2000 report from the Institute of Medicine (IoM), a division of the National Academy of Sciences. Even when using conservative estimates, the number of deaths due to medical errors outranks the number of fatalities attributed to the eighth leading cause of death in the United States. In fact, preventable injuries resulting from health care affect an estimated three percent to four percent of hospital patients.

Medication errors alone kill more than 7,000 people each year - more than the 6,000 people lost to workplace injuries annually. Some estimates suggest that preventable adverse drug events cost some $2 billion annually.

But despite the staggering numbers, silence surrounds the issue, according to the IoM. When medical mistakes are addressed, they are often blamed on individual incompetence. Yet experts say that the root of the problem is the lack of system-wide strategies to prevent common human errors, as well as the fragmented delivery of health care.

This course will look at the problem of rampant medication errors. After completing the course, readers should understand the scope of the issue and comprehend strategies for error reduction that can be implemented in a variety of health care settings.

Health care providers should read the course material carefully and answer 70% of the questions in the post-evaluation exam correctly to earn continuing education credits. Estimated time to complete this activity is approximately 5 hours.