The latest UK National Health Service (NHS) figures show that 86,000 errors were made in medication in a year in England and Wales.
Examples include patients being given a seditive instead of insulin and a patient being given 100mg of morphine instead of 10ml.
A senior NHS pharmacist said that it was ‘well known’ that such errors were underreported by a factor of 10, implying that in reality the error rate was near to 1 million a year.
Out of the 86,000 reported errors, nearly 3,000 resulted in death or a stay in hospital.
The moral as always – only go into hospital if you really have to. Hospitals are great when you really need them; but doctors and nurses are only human, and mistakes will happen.
