ISMP Safe Medicine, September/October 2006, Volume 4, Number 5. ©2006 ISMP

Brand name medicines appear in green; generic medicines appear in red.

In the News.

In 2003, the US Congress directed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to establish a committee to study medication safety. This July, the committee released its report, Preventing Medication Errors, which confirmed that mistakes with medicines happen as often as once each day for a hospitalized patient. Luckily, most mistakes are not harmful. Those that are harmful can be prevented. As a result, the committee made many recommendations to reduce the risk of mistakes with medicines.

Most of the recommendations are for doctors, nurses, and pharmacists, but some of the recommendations are for consumers. For instance, the report says the most important thing consumers can do is to maintain an up-to-date medication list. A form that can be used for this can be found on the ISMP website at: www.ismp.org/Newsletters/consumer/alerts/ISMP_Med_Form_PDF.pdf.

The committee also recommends changes to help all Americans use medicines safely, including:

• A government-sponsored patient bill of rights
• Easier-to-read leaflets about your medicine (what your pharmacy gives you with your prescription)
• Reliable information about medicines for you on the Internet through the National Library of Medicine
• A national hotline open around the clock for questions about medicines (staffed by nurses and pharmacists)
• Better electronic health records for consumers.

The full report is available at: http://darwin.nap.edu/books/0309101476/html.