Economic analysis of the prevalence and clinical and economic burden of medication error in England (11 June 2020)

Summary

This paper, published in BMJ Quality & Safety, provides national estimates of the number and clinical and economic burden of medication errors in the National Health Service (NHS) in England.

Authors conclude that ubiquitous medicines use in health care leads unsurprisingly to high numbers of medication errors, although most are not clinically important. There is significant uncertainty around estimates due to the assumption that avoidable adverse drug events correspond to medication errors, data quality and lack of data around longer-term impacts of errors. Data linkage between errors and patient outcomes is essential to progress understanding in this area.