COMMENT
Heath Ledger not the first – or the last – Australian to die from 'medication error'
Thousands of Australians admitted to hospital every year due to medication error
The tragic death of Australian actor Heath Ledger in January - not from illicit drug use but more likely from taking a cocktail of prescribed drugs - has highlighted a major problem in Western society often referred to as 'polypharmacy' - taking multiple drugs which then interact in the body, sometimes with devastating results.
Death by misuse of prescribed drugs is not a new issue, as was highlighted recently in a profile of Charles Waterstreet, a Sydney barrister, writer and film producer on the ABC's Australian Story. Waterstreet explained in the program how he had found out years later that his mother had died in 1967 of chloral hydrate poisoning after being prescribed 10 times the recommended dose. And there are many many other cases.
In 2001 official statistics showed that there were 140,000 hospital admissions in Australia due to 'medication problems'. This statistic so shocked Ken Lee, founder of HIP, that he and his colleagues devised a program - Chemconsult® - specifically to identify these sorts of medication errors. Errors caught by the program range from interactions between drugs to brand name confusion to dosages being out when decimal points are in the wrong place. Monitoring the results from the Chemconsult® program over a year showed that an incredible 1 in 6 of all prescriptions checked had some form of error on them.
Ken explained "I was surprised not only at the number of hospital admissions but also at how many prescriptions were coming through our pharmacies with errors on them. If we have any role in society as pharmacists, surely it is to prevent these errors from harming our customers and patients."
Chemconsult® is one of the core HIP systems operated at every pharmacy in the group.
02.04.08
