If you’ve gotten surgery and you came away undamaged, congratulations. A new study says you may not even be in the majority.
A study presented at the Anesthesiology 2015 conference found that almost half of procedures contained at least one error—either a medication error or an adverse drug event—in the perioperative period (the time immediately before, during, and after a procedure).
To make it even worse, 80 percent of these errors were totally preventable.
The study looked at 275 operations at Massachusetts General Hospital, and 124 of them contained some kind of error.
This isn’t a great sign, says lead author Dr. Karen C. Nanji. “Given that Mass. General is a national leader in patient safety and had already implemented approaches to improve safety in the operating room, perioperative medication error rates are probably at least as high at many other hospitals.”
The most common mistakes were incorrect dosages of medications and labeling mishaps. The longer and more complex the operation, the more likely the error.
About one-fifth of the errors they found did not end up harmful. However, one-third led to an adverse drug effect, and the rest were harmful. Thankfully, no fatalities were observed.
Though there were more errors observed than they would have liked, Nanji and her co-authors put it into perspective.
“While the frequency of errors and adverse events is much higher than has previously been reported in perioperative settings, it is actually in line with rates found in inpatient wards and outpatient clinics, where error rates have been systematically measured for many years.
“We definitely have room for improvement in preventing perioperative medication errors, and now that we understand the types of errors that are being made and their frequencies, we can begin to develop targeted strategies to prevent them.”
