News tagged with medical errors
Interruptions associated with medication errors by nurses
Nurses who are interrupted while administering medication appear to have an increased risk of making medication errors, according to a report in the April 26 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.
Apr 26, 2010 |
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Study: E-prescribing cuts medication errors by seven-fold
(PhysOrg.com) -- A Cornell medical school study finds that when doctors use electronic systems to write prescriptions, they make seven times fewer errors than when they scrawl by hand.
Mar 31, 2010 |
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Saying 'sorry' pays off for U. of Michigan doctors
(AP) -- When a treatment goes wrong at a U.S. hospital, fear of a lawsuit usually means "never daring to say you're sorry."
Jul 20, 2009 |
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Physicians click their way to better prescriptions
Is it time for all community-based doctors to turn to e-prescribing to cut down on the number of medication errors? According to Rainu Kaushal and colleagues from the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, electronic ...
Mar 10, 2010 |
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Hospitalists key to success of health care reform
Congress passed the most comprehensive healthcare reform bill since the formation of Medicare. While a monumental achievement, the bill leaves much of the critical work of healthcare reform unfinished, according to a new ...
Apr 09, 2010 |
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Setting priorities for patient-safety efforts will mean hard choices
Is it more urgent for hospitals, doctors and nurses to focus resources on preventing the thousands of falls that injure hospitalized patients each year, or to home in on preventing rare but dramatic instances of wrong-side ...
Aug 25, 2009 |
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Caffeine reduces mistakes made by shift workers
Caffeine can help those working shifts or nights to make fewer errors, according to a new study by Cochrane researchers. The findings have implications for health workers and for any industry relying on shift or night work, ...
Medicine & Health / Medical research
May 11, 2010 |
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New medics in death spike
Are new medical residents a threat to patients? According to Dr. David Phillips and Gwendolyn Barker from the University of California, San Diego in the US, fatal medication errors peak in July in teaching hospitals in particular, ...
Jun 02, 2010 |
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Preventing physician medication mix-ups by reporting them
The most frequent contributors to medication errors and adverse drug events in busy primary care practice offices are communication problems and lack of knowledge, according to a study of a prototype web-based medication ...
Medicine & Health / Medications
Dec 03, 2010 |
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Reform of primary care could reduce diagnostic errors
Errors in diagnosis place a heavy financial burden on an already costly health care system and can be devastating for affected patients. Strengthening certain aspects of a new and evolving model of comprehensive and coordinated ...
Jul 27, 2010 |
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Medical error
Medical error is an inaccurate or incomplete diagnosis and/or treatment of a disease; injury; syndrome; behavior; infection or other ailment.
In the U.S., medical errors are estimated to result in 44,000 to 98,000 unnecessary deaths and 1,000,000 excess injuries each year. One older extrapolation suggests '180,000 people die each year partly as a result of iatrogenic injury, the equivalent of three jumbo-jet crashes every 2 days'. It is estimated that in a typical 100 to 300 bed hospital in the United States, excess costs of $1,000,000 to $3,000,000 attributable to prolonged stays and complications just due to medication errors occur yearly.
However, medical error definitions are subject to debate, as there are many types of medical error from minor to major, and causality is often poorly determined. The Health Grades study statistics, based on AHRQ MedPAR data, were based on administrative records, not clinical records, and largely overlooked multi-causality of outcomes.
Medical care is frequently compared adversely to aviation: while many of the factors which lead to errors in both fields are similar, aviation's error management protocols are regarded as much more effective.
For more information about Medical error, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.