Leading Cause of Death

I was just sent an article written by Hugh M. Robert, Tulsa, who is the executive director of
the Center for Consumer and Patient Safety in Oklahoma. In the days of tort reform and promoting medical and corporate immunity, its good to see articles telling the truth.

I have yet to find a link to the article, but the following is a some quotes from that article that are most telling:

“Every year more than 1.5 million Americans experience preventable medication mistakes and more than 100,000 die. Many such errors result from unclear abbreviations and dosage indications and illegible writing, according to a recent report by the Institute of Medicine. With more than three billion prescriptions being filled each year, it is no surprise these adverse drug reaction deaths are the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S.”

“The IOM study indicates that “when all types of errors are taken into account, a hospital patient can expect, on average, to be subjected to more than one medication error per day.” With health-care costs skyrocketing,
avoiding such preventable errors has become an increasingly important task. The study found that if medication errors were eliminated, the potential health-care savings would be around $3.5 billion. This figure doesn’t even account for lost earnings or pain and suffering.”