We’ve talked about medication errors on this blog numerous times before, but we bring up the topic again because a new report is out about medication errors and pediatric care — and the numbers aren’t good.
The new report found that an average of 63,358 medication errors occur every year in the U.S. in children who are younger than the age of six. Of those errors, one quarter of them are in children aged 12 months or younger. What this means is that one every eight minutes in this country, a child no older than six is victimized by a medication error. The study also admits that these figures could actually be low, since they depend on poison control reports. Many medication errors go unreported. So who knows how much worse it really is.
Medication errors are very scary and very dangerous, because a patient isn’t going to have much of a clue as to whether his or her medicine is the right one. Pills and liquids all look generally the same, and we, as patients, trust our doctors and pharmacists to fulfill our medicine needs properly. The idea of getting the wrong medicine is not even in the patient’s mind most of the time.
The wrong medication can not only cause medical complications in a patient in their own right, but they can also allow the condition that was supposed to be treated by the correct medicine to progress and get worse. When these errors are made, the patient deserves — and indeed needs — civil justice.
Source: Anesthesiology News, “New Study Finds High Rate of Pediatric Med Errors,” Jan. 5, 2015
