
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 2, 1990                   TAG: 9005020592
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A/8   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CHICAGO                                LENGTH: Medium

ERRORS IN PRESCRIPTIONS TOO COMMON, STUDY SAYS

Efforts to cut U.S. medical costs should leave in place the safety mechanisms that catch mistakes doctors make in prescribing drugs, says a researcher who documented hundreds of such errors at a New York hospital.

The study reported in today's Journal of the American Medical Association found an average of 2 1/2 errors a day in written prescriptions at 640-bed Albany Medical Center Hospital in 1987. One in five mistakes could have been serious or fatal.

"Medication errors are an all-too-common occurrence in the provision of modern health care and one of the many `hazards of hospitalization,' " the researchers said.

Doctors at Albany wrote 289,411 prescriptions in 1987, and errors occurred in 905 of them, including 182 mistakes that could have caused severe harm or death if they had gone undetected, the researchers reported.

However, "quality assurance procedures operative within our hospital and in most health-care systems . . . appear to be quite effective," said Timothy Lesar, assistant pharmacy director for clinical services and the study's co-author.

"All these errors were averted. They never put a patient at risk," he said in a telephone interview Monday.

Five years ago, an error by two doctors in administering a drug to a pregnant cancer patient at Albany led to better drug-control procedures there, the researchers said.

The patient was left comatose and near death, and her premature baby later died; the hospital was cited by the New York Health Department for lacking effective policies to control dangerous drugs.

Now, for written prescriptions, the hospital's pharmacists enter doctors' orders into a computer that checks them again against patient data about drug allergies and other information, researchers said.

In New York hospitals overall in 1984, drugs accounted for 20 percent of the 27,000 treatment-related patient injuries, according to Dr. Howard Hiatt, head of a Harvard Medical School study released last month.

The Albany study found an error rate of 3.13 per 1,000 orders written. Of the 905 errors, 522, or 57.7 percent, were "significant," meaning they could have caused adverse consequences, the researchers said.

Mistakes varied from ordering too strong a tranquilizer for the size or age of a patient to prescribing penicillin or a related drug to a patient allergic to it.

Researchers found higher error rates in obstetrics-gynecology and surgery-anesthesia than in other services, possibly reflecting less time or emphasis on non-surgical aspects of patient care during training programs, they said.

by CNB