Medical Errors Report #23

A Four-Year Solution Implementation Study

Medical Errors Are More than Medication Errors

Medication errors might have been indicated as the largest source of medical errors, but these errors are by no means the only ones. Yes, medication errors continue to be a problem and many patients continue to die. When I interviewed a hospital manager in California about what she was doing to reduce medical errors, she told me the only thing they were working on was medication errors. Evidently, she had ignored other problems associated with deadly results. In order to decrease medical errors, every health-care institution must evaluate every process used to deliver care and identify the ones that carry the grave danger of causing errors. Identification of deficient processes is not enough, but this problem must still be immediately fixed.

 Some Generic Drugs Do not Work as Well as the Brand Name Drugs

In interviews with patients brought up a persistent complaint, about some generic drug formulas not working as well as those with brand names. Regardless of what some physicians say about brand name drugs being equally effective, patients are complaining that some generic drugs are not working as well. This puts some patients in danger. It is therefore, necessary to start comparing some generic formulas to trade name drugs in order to find out the cause of the differences in effectiveness. We have already seen drug tampering by some pharmacists who were diluting drugs to increase profit. How can we be sure whether the constituents of those generic drugs contain the active ingredients indicated on their packages?