Nowadays, there exists a great variety of medications aimed at treating a particular health issue. Due to their number, some of them have quite similar names that can potentially confuse both the patient and pharmacist (Levinthal, 2014).
Sometimes, these drugs can be mistaken due to their common active substance, so they do not do serious harm to the human body. Frequently, however, medication titles can have a direct commercial purpose, as they are created in order to be easily memorized. Such cases can lead to severe health issues and medical errors. According to the statistics published in 2016, the medical mistake was a third leading death cause in the US (Makary & Daniel, 2016). Although misspelled medications constitute a minor part of medical errors, they are still hazardous to people’s health.
In order to define ways to combat the issue, it is important to dwell upon the reasons these errors occur in the first place. According to data, some of the major problems behind medication prescription are legibility and spoken orders (Norman, 2018).
The first matter is highly individual as it concerns doctor’s handwriting that can easily be misread by a pharmacist. The second issue, on the contrary, is an example of medical negligence, as patients are not supposed to know the detailed information on various drugs, and thus, they get confused. As this issue concerns not only medication names but diagnosis and patients’ personal information as well, the healthcare system issue should be completely reconsidered. The best option in terms of records optimization is by creating a working electronic database. By doing so, pharmacists could have electronic access to a patient’s prescription and the probability of medical error would be as minimal as possible.
References
Levinthal, C. F. (2014). Drugs, behavior, and modern society. London, UK: Pearson Education.
Makary, M. A., & Daniel, M. (2016). Medical error – the third leading cause of death in the US. BMJ, i2139. Web.
Norman, A. (2018). “Minor” errors in medical records can have major consequences. Web.