Medical Errors
Norepinephrine Shortage Threatens Safety of Seri…
Another serious national shortage affects patients with sepsis, a systemic reaction to infection that can result in shock. This life-threatening drop in blood pressure is treated with injections of no…
Are You Mad As Hell About Medical Mistakes? If N…
What if the cure was indeed deadlier than the disease? An analysis published in the Journal of Patient Safety suggests that as many as 440,000 hospital patients die each year from medical mistakes tha…
Distracted Doctor Prescribes Heart Medicine for …
Q. It is essential that patients take a proactive role when interacting with their doctors, especially when it comes to medications. Here is my story. As soon as my doctor walked into the exam room I …
How Vital Are Nighttime Vital Sign Measurements?
If you have ever spent the night in a hospital bed, you know it is a terrible place to sleep. People come in throughout the night and wake you up to take your temperature, pulse and blood pressure. In…
How to Avoid Disaster at the Drugstore
Pharmacists remain among the most trusted professionals in America, just behind nurses and ahead of doctors, engineers, dentists and police officers. But even pharmacists make mistakes. We recently re…
Medication Mistakes Happen at Home
Medication mistakes are common and serious in hospital settings, but a new study shows they also happen at home. Nurses who observed parents giving their children cancer chemotherapy found that betwee…
White Coat Conspiracy Covers Up Medical Tragedy
My father died as a result of a missed diagnosis. He was in the coronary intensive care unit at a teaching hospital in upstate NY after suffering a heart attack at his home. He was treated in a timely…
Too Many Beeps Create Alarm Fatigue
Too many beeping alarms in hospital rooms may be counterproductive. These devices measure patients' vital signs and administer medications automatically. The beeps they emit are meant to alert hospita…
Is Alert Fatigue Hiding Your Test Results?
Electronic health records may be putting doctors into information overload. When the government offered to reward doctors and hospitals for adopting electronic records the goal was to improve efficien…
Overloading Doctors May Put Patients at Risk
Speedup can cause plenty of stress on a factory assembly line, but it can also cause problems in healthcare. It may even put patients' lives in danger. That's the conclusion from a scientific survey c…
Why Hospitals Should Study Airlines
The airline industry is in turmoil about the grounding of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. The Federal Aviation Administration took pre-emptive action because of fears that the lithium batteries could overh…
Crisis Checklist Means Life or Death in Surgical…
When something bad happens during surgery, doctors must make life and death decisions on the spur of the moment. In the chaos following a cardiac arrest, major bleed or life-threatening allergic react…
Did Surgeons Really Leave 16 Items Inside Patien…
It is one of those stories that sends shivers up and down our spines. Next to operating on the wrong patient or the wrong body part, leaving surgical "stuff" inside a patient's body tops our list of "…
Too Much Tylenol in the Hospital
Tylenol is one of the most familiar and trusted brand names in America. In fact, commercials for the popular pain reliever used to proclaim: "Trust Tylenol. The pain reliever hospitals use most." A ne…
Surgical Errors Are Tip of the Iceberg
Doctors call them "never events" because they are never supposed to happen. In surgery this term applies to things like leaving an instrument or a sponge inside the patient, operating on the wrong sid…
What Does Your Doctor Write About You?
Doctors have been keeping secrets for thousands of years. The Hippocratic Oath, which dates back to the 5th century BC, extracts a promise from physicians that they will share their knowledge only wit…
Contaminated Steroid Injections in Other Joints?
In 2012, there was a scandal related to impure steroid created under improper manufacturing conditions in a compounding pharmacy in Massachusetts. People all over the country who'd had contaminated s…
Unnecessary Antibiotics Put Seniors at Risk
Significant variation in patterns of antibiotic use from one part of the country to another may indicate that older people are being needlessly exposed to risks. The researchers reviewed data on antib…
Don’t Rush the Pharmacist
Pharmacy mistakes are surprisingly common, but it should come as no surprise that speed contributes to errors. A survey of almost 700 pharmacists by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices found t…
Sidestepping Screwups in Health Care
Many People's Pharmacy readers are all too aware of the potential for prescription problems and the dangers of misdiagnoses. Health care providers are, after all, human beings and humans make mistakes…
Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s Advice for Avoiding Med…
Dr. Gupta is a giant! It's not that Sanjay Gupta, MD, is all that tall, but he is an amazing physician and communicator. Let's start with the fact that he is a distinguished neurosurgeon. He is also a…
Medication Mistakes Could Be Deadly
When an airplane crashes, the public demands to know what went wrong. They also want the problem to be corrected so it won't happen again. When it comes to medicine, however, there are rarely investig…
Pharmacy Mistakes Could Be Deadly
The modern pharmacy is big and busy. Hundreds of prescriptions are filled daily in a typical chain drugstore. Everyone is in a hurry. Pharmacists and technicians work at maximum speed with limited tim…
The Hidden Hazards of Health Care
Imagine the uproar that would occur if a new disease were discovered that killed half a million people a year. That would rival the death rate from heart attacks and cancer. No doubt alarms would be r…
What Are the Top 10 Screwups Doctors Make when P…
In our brand new book about medical mistakes we have a chapter titled "Top 10 Screwups Doctors Make When Prescribing." Here is our Top 10 list: Failing to disclose drug side effects Creating obstacles…
Low Marks for American Health Care
Americans are fond of claiming to have the best health care system in the world. We certainly have the most expensive health care. But a new scorecard released by the Commonwealth Fund shows that heal…
Checklist Saves Lives and Money
Steps to cut down on bloodstream infections not only save lives but cut hospital costs as well. That's the conclusion of a study focusing on a checklist program implemented throughout the state of Mic…
Medication Errors in Assisted Living Facilities
Q. I have been a critical care nurse for more than 30 years and recently started monitoring assisted living facilities for the state. Most medication errors are made by their medication technicians. T…
Pharmacy Errors Can Be Deadly
Pharmacists are on the front line for patient safety. They provide a safety net for medication mistakes. Very often they save lives when a prescriber makes an error. Here's one example a pharmacist of…
Computerized Prescribing Reduces Errors
Doctors are being rewarded for switching to electronic medical records and computerized prescribing. One of the goals to this component of health care reform is to reduce prescription errors. A team a…
Be Alert for Pharmacy Errors
Ask pharmacists about their number one responsibility and you will probably hear that patient safety is primary. The problem is that working conditions often interfere with that mission. When pharmaci…
Drugstore Haste Leads to Harm
Americans are trusting. When their doctors prescribe medicine, patients rarely take time to ask what it's for, how to take it or what the side effects might be. At the pharmacy, most people grab and g…
Surgeons Are Less Sharp After a Night on the Tow…
Surgeons need to be at the top of their game whenever they cut into a patient. That's why a responsible physician would never drink alcohol during the day they perform surgery. But what about the nigh…
Medical Errors Much Too Common
Medical errors may occur ten times more often than experts have estimated. That's because measuring hospital mistakes is difficult. Researchers have relied on voluntary reports from health care provid…
Communication Failures Put Patients at Risk
Checklists and other safety strategies alert health care workers to potential problems that may endanger patients. Unfortunately, such policies aren't enough to ensure patient safety. In a new study, …
Hospital Changes Keep Patients Safer
Using a checklist to make sure that catheters are put in and maintained properly can dramatically reduce bloodstream infections. New research shows it can also reduce mortality. The checklist was deve…
Surgeons to Disclose Sleep Deprivation
Surgeons may someday be required to let patients know they are sleep-deprived before an operation. An editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine proposes that it is unethical for doctors to oper…
Confusing Instructions for Children’s OTC …
Parents who try to give their children accurate amounts of over-the-counter liquid medicine encounter unexpected complications. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reviewed dosi…
Be Vigilant to Avoid Harm in the Hospital
One hundred years ago hospitals were dangerous places. Many Americans believed that if you went to the hospital you were taking your life in your hands. Sterile technique left a lot to be desired and …
Patient Safety Still Lags
Little progress has been made since the 1999 report on medical mistakes entitled To Err Is Human. A study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine reveals that there has been no significa…