Medication Errors

Essay by kimmin83 May 2004

download word file, 3 pages 3.7

Downloaded 93 times

My personal experience that I have one type of medical error such as "error of omission." It includes that my older sister medication getting mislabeled. She supposes to take half of the pill while the description said to take two tables every day. After few days later, she passes out and our family immediately took her to the hospital emergency room. Her kidneys were suffering from the medication because she had taken it for a couple of days and her pain kept getting worst. She had to stay hospital for a long time and she went through enormous pain through out the whole process. This experience has made my family more aware and involved because it causes tremendous fear with in all of us. We are now more careful and try to get complete information prior to taking any medication.

According to the reader, this kind of error results from a "failure to administer a drug that was prescribed."

And errors occur frequently and they have quadrupled. We learned that from Dr. Curry's lecture, they are often explained away as "the natural cause of the patient's illness" even though evidence shows otherwise.

The overall cause for errors of omission is easy explained that Jon Billimeck's lecture, "Ignoring signals that show health care officials what actions need to be taken." It seems like; the cause for omission to occur includes lack of communication between the individuals involved. According to the reader the specific causes of errors of omission can occur at variety of levels for example there could be errors in prescribing the medication, dispensing by the pharmacist and unintentional non-adherence on the part of the patient. It is easy to find the causes of these errors because we know who prescribes the medication and at what location it...