"Hospital medications and music festivals, are we dancing to the same tune?"

SYDNEY - Feb. 5, 2019 - PRLog -- There has been a lot of media and public attention given to dance parties and so-called "recreation drugs". The attention uncovers the increasing availability and normalisation of illegal drug use in the community.

Each weekend where there is a new event or party, and you can almost sit and wait for the inventible drug reactions, hospitalizations and in some cases the terrible announcement of a death of a young person at the start of their life.

What if we also turned this around and looked at legal pharmaceuticals, with known ingredients, regulated doses, used in what would be the safest environment, a hospital bed.

Each year, in hospitals and long term care facilities nationwide, there are potentially thousands of adverse drug events. These range from no effect on patient safety, through to serious events and even deaths. By using data from a 2012 article in the British Medical Journal, we can estimate that there are between 70 and 120 actual serious adverse events in a typical large hospital of 600 beds in a year. Multiply that by the number of hospitals and long term care facilities and this number rapidly increases.

These events lead to intervention, increased bed stays, long term disability and management, through to death. The human tariff, emotional and physically, combined with the financial cost is massive. In a hospital that dispensed some 6,000,000 medications annually, the financial cost has been put at $25-35 million per major hospital per annum1.

There are many reasons that patients are exposed to this risk, ranging from too few staff, healthcare professional stress, lack of automation, and adequate checking of details. So where is the discussion of drug use in a safe environment, like a hospital? Hospitals are made of highly skilled staff, in a highly regulated environment so why do we still have medication errors? It's the final link of checking the medication to the patient at the bedside that is not consistent. By regulating and using smart tools to qualify medication administration it can surely go a long way to close the medication loop.

Now back to the dance party. Lots of music, lots of fun. Well almost. This is where people knowingly take illegal drugs in an uncontrolled environment with a few terrible deaths a year. Even though every effort should be made to call a halt to dance party deaths, we need to comeback to a clear healthcare initiative in medication management at the bedside. Or should we compare the spend on road injuries and deaths to preventable bedside medication errors as well?

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1 Adverse Drug Events caused by Serious Medication Administration Errors Abhivyakti Sawarkar, MD, MSc1,2, Carol A. Keohane, BSN, RN1, Saverio Maviglia, MD, MSc1,3, Tejal K Gandhi, MD, MPH1,2,3, and Eric G Poon, MD, MPH1,2,3 1Brigham & Women's Hospital, Boston, MA 2Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 3Partners Information Systems, Boston, MA