The number of patients who die in England and Wales after errors in drug prescribing or from an adverse drug reaction is showing a marked upward trend, the Audit Commission has warned.
The commission estimated that just under 11% of patients on hospital medical wards experience an adverse event, such as being given the wrong drug or having an adverse reaction to a drug.
Such an event, although not fatal, can lead on average to an additional stay in hospital of 8.5 days, costing the NHS as much as £1.1bn ($1.5bn; €1.8bn).
“The problem is that nobody really knows the extent of the problem,” said the report's author, Nick Mapstone. Only one hospital that was visited had a comprehensive system of reporting errors.
Errors included giving patients with cancer temazepam when they should have received tamoxifen; giving a contraceptive steroid instead of an antipsychotic injection; and prescribing an anticancer medicine at 1000 times the correct dose. The commission estimated that nearly half these events were preventable.
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