Helping with Medication: Administering medicines effectively
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It is easy for mistakes and errors to occur during the process of prescribing, dispensing, administering and taking different pills and medicines. This guide aims to help you understand how you can minimise the risks and increase medication safety for you and yours.
If you are caring for an older relative, there is a high chance that they are taking a lot of different medicines and that you might need to help them organise their prescriptions. In doing so, you can help to keep those you love safe and well by being alert to problems relating to common medication errors and mistakes.
It is increasingly recognised that all sorts of preventable harm can arise due to medication and prescription related errors.
Medicine related slip-ups can happen at any stage – when a medicine is prescribed by a clinician (known as prescribing errors), dispensed by a pharmacist, given to or taken by a patient (technically labelled administration) and then monitored by all involved.
Experts have shown that medication errors are common. One study found that around 237 million medication errors occur at some point in the medication process in England every year.
Fortunately most of these errors (72%) cause minimal harm to patients and only a very small proportion (2%) cause severe harm. Nevertheless, that means that around one quarter of medication errors cause moderate harm, potentially leading to emergency hospital care.
Errors can happen in any setting including at home, in the GP surgery, in hospital or in residential care. The frequency of errors does vary across settings. Although error rates are lowest in primary care, it deals with so much medication that it is responsible for 38.4% of all errors. By contrast, care homes deal with much fewer patients but have much higher error rates per patient resulting in a high proportion of all errors (41.7%). 19.9% of errors relate to hospital care.
Mistakes can also occur at any stage although they are most likely to occur when a drug is prescribed (21.3%) or given/taken by a patient (54.4%) Prescription errors include:
Administration related errors include:
Some medicines are especially dangerous if they are misused or used in error. Common medicines on the “high risk” list include:
The most common medication errors relating to GP prescribed medicines relate to:
Errors can occur during transition whenever medication is reviewed, transcribed and deliberately or unintentionally changed. Medication can change deliberately when a new drug is started, when the dose of a drug is changed or when an existing medication is discontinued. These can occur unintentionally if there is an error in transcribing the drug name, dose or frequency.
Every time a patient moves to a different health care setting there is a high risk of introducing a medication or prescription error. Whether it’s being admitted to hospital, to a different ward, to a day unit, consulting with a hospital specialist or primary care clinician or being discharged home or somewhere else, each transition and interaction has the potential to introduce a mistake.
Unanticipated harms can occur if a new drug is prescribed, or the dosage is changed, without being fully aware of the patients current or previous medication record, the patient’s health state, or any drug related allergies or sensitivities.
Nowadays people take all sorts of food or vitamin supplements, painkillers, and herbal remedies to improve their health. It is important to know that these are a form of medicine and can carry the same dangers as prescribed medicines.
They can also interact with prescribed medicines and shape how safe or effective they are.
parent(s) and relevant clinicians to minimise any avoidable harm. Make sure you:
If you are involved in giving someone their medication or supervising them taking it, then make sure you check the name and dose of each item and make sure that it is not on the list of known allergies or sensitivities. You will also find other ways of helping with medication in this article about polypharmacy in the Book Case.
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Did you find this information helpful? Let us know what you think or pass on some advice to other carents by emailing us at [email protected]
Published July 2023, updated June 2024
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