Around 1.5 million preventable medication errors occur in the American health system each year at a cost of over $4 billion annually, according to a new report released yesterday by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The report’s release marks the start of a new effort to reduce those numbers.
The FDA’s “Safe Use” initiative (full report [PDF], fact sheet) also aims to reduce overdoses of prescription medications taken outside of hospitals and doctor’s offices, which result in 100,000 hospitalizations each year.
Because these problems have so many different causes, the initiative will involve multiple approaches. Medication errors vary widely—encompassing situations as distinct as a doctor prescribing the wrong dose of a drug, a nurse injecting the wrong medication, a child getting into her mother’s pills and suicides or accidental overdoses of prescription medications diverted into street use.
They even include incidents—that occur a frightening 600 times a year—when a surgical patient catches on fire because alcohol-containing swabs were incorrectly used to prepare the skin over the area where the surgeons are operating.
“Up to half of all medication-related injuries could be prevented using currently available knowledge,” said Margaret Hamburg, the FDA commissioner, at a press conference held to release the report.
The FDA did not announce the specifics of the interventions under consideration—but has called for collaboration between doctors, patients, drug companies, pharmacists, nurses and others in the health system to develop ideas about the best ways to reduce each particular type of error or harm. The agency will call for public comment and written suggestions in relation to these efforts as they develop.
I covered one idea that seems worth consideration for Time online previously. It involves providing naloxone– a medication that can reverse overdoses containing prescription painkillers or heroin—with prescriptions for strong opioids like Oxycontin. That way, whether a pain patient, an addict or a child makes a mistake with these drugs, the antidote is on-hand when precious seconds count. Overdoses involving opioids are the most common cause of overdose death, which kills about 22,000 Americans each year.