I draw your attention to the article reported on today’s (Feb. 11) BBC News Web site titled “Hospital drugs reactions common.”

The article refers to a study that finds that“one in seven hospital patients experience adverse drug reactions, half of which are completely avoidable.”

In some cases these adverse drug reactions have unnecessarily resulted in patient deaths. The article highlights the need for UK hospitals to improve their prescribing practices, a major issue which has been identified and reported on a number of times in recent years.

The study identifies electronic prescribing as one of the possible intervention strategies in the reduction of adverse drug reactions.

“The real tragedy of this study is that injury and death caused by adverse drug reactions, doesn’t have to happen. There are electronic prescribing systems (with integrated clinical decision support) available here and now that are able to prevent medication errors. Such systems are demonstrating real benefits in the hospitals where they have already been introduced.”

“Paper-based systems are no longer an acceptable means of recording and cross checking patient records against potential interactions. We strongly urge more hospitals to consider transferring from paper-based systems, which can be subject to error, to reduce the risk of adverse drug reactions and improve patient safety.”

These systems support clinicians in their decision making by flagging up potential adverse drug reactions.

At the point that a clinician prescribes a medication to a patient, the clinical decision support checks the medication against information held in the patient’s Electronic Health Record, and generates an on-screen alert message if there are potential clinical problems.

I realise that NHS Connecting for Health is addressing this issue as part of the National Programme for IT. However, there are systems available today which, if introduced into more hospitals, could further reduce the number of medication errors and thereby improve patient safety.

– David Flavell
President, First DataBank International