JUNE 25 is Philippine Patient Safety Day.
It is good that the Department of Health has brought the attention of the public to this area of public health because, unlike in developed countries, awareness of patient safety is close to nil in the country. In fact, research literature in the Philippines is anemic on the issue of patient safety.
If the academe is not interested about it, neither the hospitals nor the public will. I personally observed how hypertensive medication was prescribed for a mother who recently delivered a child, but the former had no history of hypertension. After I pointed out the oversight at the nurses’ station, that was when they removed the order from the chart. This happened in one of the largest private teaching hospitals in Cebu City.
Perhaps, many patients encountered these errors but remained unreported because the family themselves were not adequately educated on medical sciences. Some of these families simply wondered why their relatively active patients died in the hospital for minor medical conditions.
These mistakes (e.g. medication errors and other physician- or nursing-related errors) are not isolated because even in the United States, these errors had been encountered. These incidents had prompted the research community to focus on patient safety since then.
Here in the Philippines, that is not yet the case.
A 2010 study by five nurses (Germin Carino, Rowell Divinagracia, Rupert Reyes, Godfrey Sia and Sydiongco) at the Philippine Heart Center (PHC) found that prescribing errors constituted 90.8 percent of the medication errors committed in an institution. The study abstract did not mention the name of the institution. However, considering the usual policy of cross-institution restrictions in the country, the sampled institution could be PHC itself. Unfortunately, this study did not find publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Nevertheless, PHC should be commended for publishing this in their website.
Dispensing errors, which is a pharmacy error, represented the largest (92.5 percent) source of medication errors. Other sources of errors included medication administration (85.4 percent), which is usually the responsibility of nurses, and order processing, which is also a nursing task.
Still, medication errors are only the tip of the iceberg of medical errors. There are also cases of surgical errors, laboratory errors, error or delay in diagnosis, avoidable delay in treatment, and many more.
Medication errors are serious threats to patient safety. It must be placed into public awareness so that health care institutions in the country will be motivated to do something about it.