More Patients Failing To Manage Their Medications

"Increasingly, people take their medications at home, away from hospitals and clinics. But most studies of fatal medication errors have focused on those clinical settings. We wanted to know three things: how many of these fatal errors happen at home; how many involve alcohol and/or street drugs; and are these numbers going up?"

For the study, the researchers examined all US death certificates from 1st January 1983 to 31st December 2004 (over 49.5 million), and particularly those citing fatal medication errors (FMEs, nearly 225 thousand).

They classified the deaths into 4 types of FME: domestic or non-domestic, with and without alcohol/street drugs and examined them with respect to the relative importance of alcohol or street drugs and the relative likelihood of professional supervision in the use of the medications.

The four FME types were:

Type 1 = domestic FMEs combined with alcohol and/or street drugs,
Type 2 = domestic FMEs not involving alcohol and/or street drugs,
Type 3 = nondomestic FMEs combined with alcohol and/or street drugs, and
Type 4 = nondomestic FMEs not involving alcohol and/or street drugs.

The results showed that:

• Overall FME death rate went up by 360.5 per cent during the 1983 to 2004 period. from MedicalNewsToday