Medication Errors: Managing the Risk (Inperspective‪)‬

The medication errors experienced by actor Dennis Quaid's newborn twins have received a lot of media attention. While hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles last November for treatment of a staph infection. Quaid's twins received a dangerous overdose of heparin. Each baby received 10,000 units of the drug rather than the 10 units they were supposed to receive. Quaid and his wife Kimberly Buffington have sued the maker of the heparin formulation the children received, and are in the process of setting up a foundation to address the problem of hospital errors. Although this experience aimed the spotlight at mistakes made in the hospital setting, medication errors are all too prevalent in long-term care as well. A drug safety study completed by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) found that medication errors are surprisingly common; approximately 800,000 preventable adverse drug events (ADE) occur each year in long-term care facilities and $887 million is spent annually to treat medication errors that occur in Medicare recipients ages 65 and older. (1) A 2005 study published in the American Journal of Medicine, indicated that one out of every 10 nursing home residents suffers a medication-related injury and that 73 percent of the most severe injuries, including internal bleeding and death, was preventable. (2)