No one would ever fly an airline if one out of every 14 flights crashed. A seven percent failure record is simply unthinkable. Fortunately, the airline industry has engineered errors out of their systems to the point where last year there were just 2.1 aeroplane accidents for every one million departures. Yet in healthcare, where medication administration still relies on error-prone human processes rather than automated solutions, seven percent of children who need care in an emergency– one out of every 14– will receive a harmful or fatal medication error. Medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US.
Why is this at all acceptable in medicine? Sadly, the real answer is that it is hard to be perfect. But with patients’ lives at stake, it’s even harder not to be. 1. Adverse Drug Events (ADE’s) continue to be the leading type of non-surgical adverse event occurring in…
