WHO moots plan to save patients from fatal medical errors
The World Health Organisation has unveiled a global plan to halve the adverse drug effects caused by medical errors in the next five years. PHOTO | FILE
What you need to know:
- larmingly, such errors cause at least one death every day and injure approximately 1.3 million people annually in the United States alone.
he World Health Organisation has unveiled a global plan to halve the adverse drug effects caused by medical errors in the next five years.
The Global Patient Safety Challenge-Medication Safety will seek to strengthen the healthcare systems to reduce “feebleness” linked to medication errors that can be fatal and place an enormous and unnecessary strain on national health budgets.
Medication errors can be caused by health worker fatigue, overcrowding, staff shortages, poor training and the wrong information being given to patients, the health body says. Alarmingly, such errors cause at least one death every day and injure approximately 1.3 million people annually in the United States alone.
In a statement, Dr Margaret Chan, the WHO director-general, says: “We all expect to be helped, not harmed, when we take medication.” The United Nations agency also advocates for the awareness among patients of the dangers of incorrect and inconsistent use of certain drugs.
The guidelines, unveiled in Geneva, also lay out standards and principles of drug prescription, distribution and consumption.
In low- and middle-income countries such as Kenya, the effect is about twice as much in terms of the number of years of healthy life lost, but there is barely any data on this, WHO points out.
