SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN

Ten thousand safety alerts over medication given to children are being issued annually in the NHS, including serious errors in the calculation of drug doses and health workers forgetting to give patients their medicine, research shows.

The first report into health service safety incidents concerning children shows that 61,000 alerts were recorded between October 2007 and September 2008 in the care of patients under 18, with 18,200 involving babies aged under 1 month.

A quarter of the cases were the result of misuse of medication, including examples where patients received ten times too much of a drug owing to a dosing miscalculation. There were more than 2,800 alerts involving wrong or unclear dose or strength and children under the age of 4 were particularly affected.

The report, by the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA), concludes that over the period there were 33 deaths of children and 39 deaths of newborn babies that had “indicators of avoidable factors”.

Jenny Mooney, head of child health at the NPSA, said that one concern was the very small number of alerts from the primary care sector — only 4 per cent of the 61,000 total — suggesting that the figure was a substantial underestimate.

Dr Mooney said that the review showed that errors could occur when calculating and preparing drug doses for children. “It comes down to the availability in terms of drugs. You would always try to get them in liquid form, but sometimes you may not be able to. You end up having to crush up tablets . . . and it is fraught with potential problems.”

Other examples included confusion over milligrams and micrograms. Among babies, errors relating to treatment or procedure was the most common incident type (3,294 alerts), followed by medication incidents (2,881). Among children, medication incidents were the most commonly reported incident type (7,029), followed by treatment or procedure (5,416) and accidents involving the patient (4,576).

This really isn’t rocket science, but is down to the lack of proper training, for which the GMC is responsible.



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