Therapeutic misadventure

Therapeutic misadventure can be defined as an injury or an adverse event caused by medical management rather than by an underlying disease. Within the National Health Service there were over 86,000 reported adverse incidents in 2007. In the USA medication errors have been rated as the fourth highest cause of death. Unfortunately one of the greatest contributors to iatrogenic injury is human error. The potential types of misadventure are infinite. Medication errors are a major part of this, being responsible for over 70% of cases that cause serious harm. However, many medication errors caused by slips, lapses, technical errors and mistakes are preventable; intentional violations of safe operating procedures are not. While medication errors were tolerated by society in the past, the readiness to institute criminal proceedings against health-care professionals has increased greatly in the UK over the last decade. The medication process consists of writing prescriptions, dispensing the product, administering it and monitoring its effects. Prescription errors arise owing to incomplete information, lack of appropriate labelling, environmental factors and human blunders. Even with a perfect prescription the right medication must be dispensed and appropriately labelled. Dispensing errors are not uncommon and may be compounded by non-clinical considerations. Administration of a drug by injection is one of the most dangerous aspects of the medication process, especially in inexperienced hands. The final component of medication supply is monitoring the effect of the medication. With short courses of medication such monitoring is easy, but with long-term medication, particularly with potent drugs where the margin between efficacy and toxicity is small, active procedures may be required to ensure toxicity does not ensue. Despite the endeavour of health-care professions to stick to the rule of 'first, do no harm', in reality this is difficult to achieve all of the time. When errors occur the natural thoughts of wanting to blame an individual at the sharp end (active error) should be tempered. Identifying and correcting system (latent) errors will, in the end, provide a safer health-care system.