According to doctors and medical researchers, the chances for error when giving patients undergoing chemotherapy medication, is high.
Statistics shown from a study done by Dr. Marlene Miller of the John Hopkins School of Medicine prove that close to 85 percent of prescription errors are not found until the medication is handed over to the patient.
In many cases, this has been harmful to the patients and has even required some to seek additional treatment to counteract the falsely given drugs.
Most of these errors occur with children receiving chemotherapy due to the fact that chemotherapy medications are stronger than most drugs, and therefore, the gap for error is slight.
"I can give four times the amount of Motrin, and you will be fine," explains Miller. "You cannot do that for chemo; they have a very narrow safety window."
The Study
MEDMARX, the United States Pharmacopeia's voluntary medication error reporting database, reports that 310 errors were found in patients from 69 different institutions.
The most common types of errors were mistakes in doses and quantities given to patients by health care professionals.
When it comes to chemotherapeutics, Miller explains that, "The dosing is so different, so the vendors haven't built in the logic yet, so we have lots of interventions and tools to improve patient safety, but chemo falls off the radar screen."
Safety Pre-Cautions Needed
Miller explains that often, hospitals use computer systems to determine the proper dosages to give to each patient; however, these systems tend to exclude chemotherapy medications, so health care professionals need to practice pre-cautions before distributing drugs.
Sarah Scarpace, a clinical pharmacist at UCSF, suggests an elementary plan. Scarpace says that the "time out" rule should be implemented at hospitals.
She explains that when doctors and nurses are handling chemotherapy medications they take a moment to ensure that they are giving out the correct drug, in the correct amount, to the correct person.
(Source: The Atlanta Journal Constitution)
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