Medication histories recorded for trauma patients in a rural population were highly inaccurate and incomplete due to communication problems among hospital personnel and difficulties in obtaining complete medical histories from patients who have trouble speaking or remembering exactly what medications they take. The study was published online in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.
Researchers studied 234 trauma patients in a rural setting, the majority of whom were moderately injured. Medication lists given upon admission to the hospital were inaccurate 85 percent of the time. Ten patients were ordered wrong medications, and one adverse drug event (hypoglycemia) occurred. Some of the reasons that medication lists were incomplete included poorly informed or forgetful patients or accompanying family members, patients taking medications from pharmacies who would not divulge patient information, and patients with multiple physicians outside the hospital who did not know what the others were prescribing.
“Across health care, medicine-related errors are the costliest ‘disease’ in America, principally because we have no good system for recording all of a patient’s medications,” said Miller. Read the press release.
