%0 Journal Article
%T Medication errors and shift to a culture of patient safety and high reliability
%J Archive of "Canadian Oncology Nursing Journal".
%D 2016
%X Medication errors with antineoplastic drugs can be disastrous to patients due to the drugsĄ¯ high toxicity and limited therapeutic index. Cancer patients often require numerous complex and often toxic therapies for treatment, which requires careful coordination of care. In a study involving 6,607 antineoplastic prescriptions, the researchers found an error rate of 5.2% (449). The highest errors were prescription errors (91%), followed with pharmaceutical (8%) and administration errors (1%). The researchers estimated that 13.4% of these errors would have resulted in a patient injury, 2.6% in permanent damage, and 2.6% would have affected the prognosis of the cancer patient. Gandhi et al. (2005) found the chemotherapy error rate was 3% in 3,200 chemotherapy orders for adult and pediatric patients. In a study involving pediatric and adult oncology patients, the authors found chemotherapy errors were 0.3 to 5.8 per 100 visits (Walsh et al., 2009)
%U https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6516308/