Pharmacists could cut medication mistakes -study
CHICAGO, April 27 (Reuters) - Pharmacists who spend extra time talking to heart patients about their drugs and looking for medication errors make a significant difference at reducing mistakes, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
A study suggests pharmacists could play a significant role at reducing medication errors, which cost the United States as much as $177 billion a year. Many commonplace errors go unnoticed, causing adverse health reactions, it said.
Dr. Michael Murray of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and colleagues studied the effect of a program that trained pharmacists to prevent drug-related errors.
They studied 800 people with heart failure or high blood pressure who took part in one of two clinical trials.
One group worked with pharmacists who had been trained to instruct patients on the proper use of their medications, to monitor the patients, and to communicate with their doctors to spot errors.
The other group got medication from pharmacists with no special training.
Murray and colleagues, writing in the Archives of Internal Medicine, said they found 210 medication errors or harmful side effects among the patients in the study.
The most common errors included giving patients a prescription for a drug that should be avoided in elderly patients, vaginal yeast infections in women taking antibiotics or prescriptions for multiple products containing the painkiller acetaminophen.
Compared with the control group, people who got their drugs from specially trained pharmacists had a 35 percent lower risk of adverse drug reactions and a 37 percent lower risk of medication errors.
Murray and colleagues said pharmacists trained at looking for medication errors and explaining proper use of medications to patients with complex conditions could save a 50,000-patient practice roughly $600,000 in annual charges. (Editing by Andrew Stern and Mohammad Zargham)
A study suggests pharmacists could play a significant role at reducing medication errors, which cost the United States as much as $177 billion a year. Many commonplace errors go unnoticed, causing adverse health reactions, it said.
Dr. Michael Murray of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and colleagues studied the effect of a program that trained pharmacists to prevent drug-related errors.
They studied 800 people with heart failure or high blood pressure who took part in one of two clinical trials.
One group worked with pharmacists who had been trained to instruct patients on the proper use of their medications, to monitor the patients, and to communicate with their doctors to spot errors.
The other group got medication from pharmacists with no special training.
Murray and colleagues, writing in the Archives of Internal Medicine, said they found 210 medication errors or harmful side effects among the patients in the study.
The most common errors included giving patients a prescription for a drug that should be avoided in elderly patients, vaginal yeast infections in women taking antibiotics or prescriptions for multiple products containing the painkiller acetaminophen.
Compared with the control group, people who got their drugs from specially trained pharmacists had a 35 percent lower risk of adverse drug reactions and a 37 percent lower risk of medication errors.
Murray and colleagues said pharmacists trained at looking for medication errors and explaining proper use of medications to patients with complex conditions could save a 50,000-patient practice roughly $600,000 in annual charges. (Editing by Andrew Stern and Mohammad Zargham)
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