Ten deaths per year that could be avoided

IN the past four years, ten people are known to have died in Irish hospitals because they were given the wrong medication, or the wrong dose. That’s ten fathers or mothers or sisters or brothers or children: ten families grieving who might otherwise have their loved one at home. Ten wholly unnecessary, preventable deaths.

Now of course we must acknowledge that every day, tens of thousands – perhaps hundreds of thousands – of medication doses are handed out. We know that many of our doctors and nurses are overworked, overtired and prone as a result to perfectly understandable human error. Some might even say that given the volumes of medicine dispensed, ten deaths over four years does not sound extreme.

Yet the deaths are just the tip of the iceberg. More than 70 drug errors are recorded every week: and a recent Hiqa report found that 6% of hospital-discharge prescriptions contained potentially severe prescription errors.

No wonder the Irish Patients Association fears that the true figure for deaths and casualties as a result of drug errors could be significantly higher than the official figures suggest.

What the official figures do strongly indicate, however, is two central failings within our hospitals. The first is for a proper, robust system of checks which would make sure that medication errors are extremely hard to make. Human error can never be completely eliminated from any giant system: but, particularly with the aid of modern technology, it can always be reduced. A strong system of checks could be put in place to ensure that it was incredibly difficult for such a mistake to occur.

And therein lies the rub: unless someone is made to take responsibility for these errors, this will not happen. So long as those who are to blame are not held publicly accountable and responsible, nothing will change.

And by this we do not just mean pointing the finger at the nurse or doctor who makes an error: we mean holding the hospital managers and bosses responsible. If a medic disobeys the strict rules on prescriptions, then action should follow: but if a hospital does not have strict rules, and if the rules are not enforced, then it is the people in charge who should carry the can. After all, this is not just a serious issue: it is literally a matter of life or death.