Jeremy Hunt Pledges Crackdown on NHS Medicine Errors Causing 22,000 Deaths a Year
The errors may be leading to high human and monetary costs every year in the UK.
Jeremy Hunt, the Health and Social Care Secretary, has ordered a crackdown on medicine errors in the National Health Service, which may be causing up to 22,000 deaths a year and a cost of £1.6 billion in hospital admissions. The figures have come from research on patient safety from Universities at York, Manchester and Sheffield.
There are about 270 million drug errors every year in the UK, with three quarters of those not harming patients. However, for the rest, patients may suffer harm or even die when they are given the wrong drug or the wrong dose.
Under the Government's plans, hospitals will access prescribing data collected by the GPs of admitted patients to ascertain if their medicines had led to their hospital admission. The initial plan is to test patients treated for gastro-intestinal bleeding, but it will later be extended to other conditions.
The research estimates that 71% of the 270 million errors happen when patients see GPs or practice nurses, with mistakes happening more often amongst older patients suffering from a number of illnesses and using several medications.
Leyla Hannbeck, chief pharmacist at the National Pharmacy Association, the body representing independent pharmacies, commented that community pharmacy dispenses about one billion prescription items each year and query about 6.6 million of them, thus helping to resolve many incidents that might otherwise have resulted in serious harm.
The World Health Organization has called drug error "a leading cause of injury and avoidable harm in healthcare systems across the world". It has targeted halving the number of serious harm incidents cause internationally over the next five years.
Comment
Any harm or injury or death through wrong medication is a concern. These figures show the scale of the challenge. It is encouraging to see the Government looking to do something about this and therefore enhance patient safety. This will also save the NHS money in terms of unwanted hospital admissions. As the NPA has pointed out, community pharmacy adds significant value to the NHS in advice given and action taken to reduce errors at the point of dispensing. In the face of the cuts that continue to be made to community pharmacy budgets, it is important to acknowledge the excellent work that they do in stopping even more drug errors and also saving the NHS money.