Improving the Quality of the Medication Use Process

Open up Improving the Quality of the Medication Use Process: Error Prevention and Reducing Adverse Drug Events, and you?ll gain instant access to crucial data pertaining to the prevention, detection, and research of error in health care, specifically in the pharmacy profession. Under the direction of this collection of current and timely chapters, you?ll find that you can become more adept at defining error, determining the factors that contribute to error, and deciding how medication errors can be reduced and even completely prevented.Each year, an estimated 120,000 preventable deaths and nearly 1,000,000 injuries occur during the course of medical treatment--a staggering and alarming figure. Improving the Quality of the Medication Use Process takes a hard look at such misguided health care and proposes quick and effective methods for intervention on the part of the individual professional and the health care community at large. These and other topics will help you in your efforts to identify error and design methods of error prevention:

the causes of medication errors
strategies relative to system modifications--practice standards, packaging, labeling, and product identity
accountability issues from various multidisciplinary health care sectors
the medical, ethical, and public policy considerations associated with medication errors and patient injuries
various system and practice initiatives currently being implemented to facilitate the medication use processImproving the Quality of the Medication Use Process is a book for physicians, pharmacists, nurses, health care system managers, the pharmaceutical industry, and the average citizen who has been in the health care system and wants to be informed before the next trip to the office or drugstore. Read it, and you?ll find that you more clearly understand the problems leading up to adverse drug events. You?ll also feel more dedicated to taking the proactive measures that will minimize or even eliminate medication errors.