The Clinical Services Journal’s technical editor, Kate Woodhead RGN DMS, examines how the World Health Organization’s GlobalPatient Safety Challenge aims to reduce medication errors.
Medication errors are those which may lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm. A report1 investigating the prevalence and economic burden of medication errors estimates that there are 237 million events in England annually – 66 million of these are potentially clinically significant.
There is little evidence of how medication errors lead to patient harm, the researchers had to use estimates from studies which identified harm from adverse drug reactions (ADRs). The NHS costs of definitely avoidable ADRs are £98 million per year, with 181,626 bed days implicated, causing 712 deaths and contributing to a further 1708 deaths.
The identification of a major source of harm to patients follows the launch in 2017 of the third World Health Organization (WHO) Global Patient Safety Challenge “Medication without Harm” which aims to reduce the global burden of severe and avoidable medication related harm by 50% over five years. Recently the WHO has published three technical reports to help countries to focus on the three identified main causes of harm caused by medications.2
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