Developing Safe Habits for Practice

Abstract

Fatal and nonfatal medication errors continue to occur in American healthcare. These are reported in a variety of ways and formats, and can include sensationalistic case reports about a patient receiving the wrong medication or more rigorous science-based research reports. It is often difficult to truly quantify the number of medication errors that occur in the United States each year and the associated costs. Varied definitions used for the terms medication error, adverse drug event, and drug-related problems make for a toxic soup when trying to sort through the true impact and cost associated with medication mistakes. In most instances, it should be enough to know that U.S. patients are harmed by medications each day by well-intentioned caregivers.